Chick-fil-A in Patton Township is getting set to temporarily close for a drive-through expansion and renovations.
The 1938 N. Atherton St. restaurant, Centre County’s only Chick-fil-A, will close at 2 p.m. on June 16 and will remain closed for about 12 weeks during the work, according to a post on its Facebook page.
“We will miss you, but are looking forward to the awesome changes that will help us serve you better!” the post stated.
After longstanding issues with traffic entering the Chick-fil-A property backing up onto North Atherton Street, Patton Township supervisors in March approved a land development plan to add a second drive-through lane, expand kitchen capacity and a redesign the pickup area.
“Essentially all of this is meant to increase the efficiency of the site,” Tyler Prime, attorney for Chick-fil-A on the project, said at the time. “As everyone is aware, this is a high-volume location and we’re looking to speed it up… modernize the site and just overall make it more efficient.”
A dual drive-through will wrap around the building before narrowing to one lane at the exit. The restaurant currently can stack 15 cars in the drive-through, with overflow space for four to eight. The dual drive-through will be able to stack 45 cars before overflow, Justin Thornton of Colliers Engineering and Design, said.
A traffic study commissioned last year by Chick-fil-A found the drive-through queue needs to accommodate at least 24 cars at a time.
In addition to having two drive-through speaker boxes, a face-to-face ordering canopy will be added allowing employees to take orders on iPads during high-volume times.
As the drive-through lanes wrap around the building, the pickup area will have an outside meal delivery canopy. The single pickup window will be replaced with a door that allows four to six employees to be delivering meals to vehicles.
A small expansion to the building will increase the kitchen capacity and add staging space near the pickup door.
No seating will be added to the restaurant and 11 parking stalls will be removed to accommodate the expanded drive-through.
“We do feel the benefit of the longer drive-through lane outweighs the loss of parking,” Thornton said in March. “Any time I visit that site right now, the stalls that we’re taking out I usually can’t even get into because the drive-thru lane is usually blocking them.”
The plan does not specifically address the issue of vehicles making left turns from North Atherton Street into Chick-fil-A, which PennDOT owns and would need to perform any structural changes. Chick-fil-A principal reinvestment lead Doug Wolfe said there were some discussions about installing a hard median, but concerns arose about impacts on businesses across the street.
Left-turning traffic was included in the traffic study, Wolfe said, and the additional drive-through capacity may alleviate the issue.
“The only reason for restricting it is that you can get stuck there and if the traffic’s out on the first lane of the road to turn in from the correct way they can’t get through, and it’s just asking for an accident,” Township Supervisor Elliot Abrams said during discussion of the plan at a December meeting. “This way you’ll be serving everybody faster, they’ll get their wonderful food faster and there will be less of a congestion there. So I just hope the plan does exactly that.”
