A drive-thru as your neighbour? No thanks

Maybe the City of Kitchener needs a few more fine-dining establishments.

Maybe it needs a decent trackand-field facility.

But what it really, really doesn’t need is yet another drive-thru fast-food restaurant near a residential neighbourhood.

It’s a complete mystery to me why the city’s planning staff would recommend a zone change allowing such an establishment to be built at the corner of Strasburg Road and Ottawa Street South, where a Petro-Canada gas station used to be.

It’s a proposal that neighbours rightly say would cause them misery and cost them money as their property values fall.

What’s wrong with drive-thrus, you might ask?

For starters: Bright lights, both from headlights and the restaurant itself, that are on most of the night. Noise from the speakers. Rats and mice. Garbage. The smell of frying food from the exhaust fan.

And worst of all, the constant pollution caused by idling cars.

“I will never be able to open my windows,” said Jeff Conrad, whose home on Roberts Crescent is adjacent to the site.

As convenient and popular as drive-thrus are in our car-crazed society, they’re awful to live beside.

Conrad lived beside the gas station when it was operating, and said he had no problem with it. It closed by 9 p.m. and had plenty of security measures to keep overnight loiterers away. There was no hamburger smell either, he said.

Kitchener council will decide Monday whether to allow the zone change.

In a report to council, planning staff noted that the developer is eager to co-operate with neighbours, and has offered to build a 2.4-metre (eight-foot) fence along with a three-metre (9.8 foot) landscape buffer. The building will be set back as far away from nearby homes as possible.

It’s interesting to read the tortured logic in the report recommending that Kitchener council approve the zone change request.

Planning staff say the zone change is “consistent with the policies and intent” of a “provincial policy statement” that has the goal of “achieving healthy, livable and safe communities” and “avoids development and land use patterns which may cause environmental or public health and safety concerns.”

Nothing about a drive-thru restaurant says “healthy” to me. We can’t even get out of our cars and walk inside to make our purchase? The sedentary lifestyle that cars gave us is part of the reason so many Canadians are unhealthy.

And how is the prospect of constantly idling cars, spewing carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and other toxic substances into the air we breathe, consistent with a policy that avoids environmental and

public health concerns?

Yet the planners writing the report emerge with the idea that the plan to have a drivethru is still a win, because it will provide jobs. There’s more. Residents rightly raise concerns that their property values will fall. That makes sense. Who wants to buy a place where you can’t even sit on your porch or open your window without the constant reminder of the drive-thru environment?

But the report asserts that according to the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, “zoning does not necessarily influence a property’s assessed value.” Instead, property values depend on things like “the state of the economy and the individual purchaser’s preferences.”

Fair enough. But perhaps the planners might like to prove their point on Monday, by producing a person who is looking to buy a home, who would really like it to be right beside a drive-thru restaurant.

I didn’t think so.