- Proposed ordinance would prohibit business-related vehicle queues from extending into public roadways.
- Officials say operational issues like promotions and mobile ordering have created new traffic challenges.
- Violations could bring fines up to $5,000 for repeat offenses within a 12-month period.
The City of Florence is seeking solutions to prevent vehicle queues from local businesses spilling onto the roads, which impacts traffic safety.
During a special meeting on April 22, Florence City Administrator Josh Hunt said that vehicle queuing becomes a concern for residents and officials when lines extend into roadways, potentially hindering emergency response times. He subsequently presented a draft ordinance to help remedy the lingering issue.
Some of the businesses that are most associated with high-traffic turnover rates are quick-service restaurants, coffee chains, truck travel centers and industrial delivery operations. Florence has a high concentration of those types of businesses due to its suburban layout and location along Interstate 75.
Hunt, however, did emphasize that there was no specific business that prompted Florence’s inquiry into the issue.
“Before I get into the ordinance, I do want to be clear that this is not about any one specific business,” Hunt said. “This is something that we are seeing across certain high turnover uses and that could be anything from quick service restaurants, coffee chains, truck stops and even sometimes industrial operations throughout the city.”
In the past, Hunt said that Florence and Boone County have addressed the issue in various ways, namely by implementing specific zoning and site design regulations.
The Boone County Zoning Code requires restaurants to have at least four stacking spaces per drive-thru lane, plus one additional space at the service window. Other business uses must typically have at least three stacking spaces per land. In addition, all vehicle stacking must be contained on-site. These regulations were implemented to prevent traffic from spilling into the public right-of-way.
“For the most part, it solved the majority of the issues that we were having with fast-food restaurants specifically,” Hunt said. “I would say it was probably about 99% effective.”
What the regulations did not account for, though, was the day-to-day operations of these businesses, such as special promotions, grand opening ceremonies and lanes for mobile ordering.
“They can all push demand beyond what the site was designed to handle, and these aren’t hypothetical situations,” Hunt said. “We’ve seen it and we’ve been documenting it throughout the city.”
To tackle the issue, Hunt introduced a new ordinance that makes it a violation for any vehicle to queue in the public right-of-way, requiring operators of commercial, industrial and non-residential businesses to manage their operations so that traffic remains on their property.
To meet this requirement, businesses are expected to implement operational measures such as on-site traffic control, queue management systems, adjusted traffic and parking patterns, limiting promotions or events that generate excessive traffic, modifying business hours and coordinating deliveries during off-peak hours.
The ordinance considers a violation any case in which a business’s vehicle queue spills onto or blocks public roads, such as blocking lanes, intersections, driveways or emergency routes or disrupting regular traffic flow. Enforcement is bolstered by documentation methods such as police records, code enforcement, video evidence and verified complaints.
The penalty for an infraction is a $1,000 fine on the first offense, a $2,500 fine for the second offense within a 12-month period, and a $5,000 fine for each subsequent offense within a 12-month period. Hunt said the measure follows the same schedule as all standard code violations in the City of Florence.
“It’s a balancing act,” Mayor Julie Metzger-Aubuchon said. “As a business owner myself, I do understand you want access to your site. You want people to be able to visit you, but you also want to make sure that you’re a good neighbor and a good steward of goodwill, and that you don’t back up people who are on their way somewhere else other than your business.”
