Bicycle Drive-Thru In Portland, Would It Work In Milwaukee?

Okay, I must confess, I was about to write a blog post about this very thing.  I was going to state how given the right building, someone like Alterra could pull this off (because biking with coffee would be fun!).  Then I came back to reality and realized that the idea was fundamentally flawed.

Drive-thrus are about as anti-community as can be.  Sure eventually the teller hands you your food and you smile back at them, but that’s about as social as the process gets.  A line of bikes would be marginally better than Toyotas, but still far from perfect.

Going inside a store fosters communication.   It encourages randomly talking to people.  You’re probably not going to become friends with the other people in the store, but you’ll recognize them elsewhere.  The faceless city you live in becomes just a little less anonymous by avoiding drive-thrus.  And in a world that is increasingly detached from the random people around us, every random connection helps.