Northern Colorado’s first In-N-Out Burger location is coming to Loveland later this year, and the restaurantap reputation for attracting huge crowds and long lines of cars is generating some anxiety in the city’s Public Works division.
On Monday, engineers from the division spoke to the city’s Transportation Advisory Board about plans for managing excess traffic during In-N-Outap opening weeks and once the burger mecca is up and running.
“I was a little nervous about this one, to be honest,” Loveland Civil Engineer Randy Maizland told the group, referring to his traffic study review for the development application. “So we had a lot of eyes on this review. … And because this location is off of a CDOT (Colorado Department of Transportation) highway, CDOT engineers also reviewed the traffic study.”
The new In-N-Out, is currently under construction at 1450 Fall River Drive, in the Centerra Marketplace shopping center. Plans for the restaurant show a 3,800-square-foot building with an attached patio, and a drive-thru lane long enough to accommodate up to 21 cars at once.
It will be the eighth Colorado location for the California-based chain, and the first outside of the Denver or Colorado Springs metro areas. There is no firm opening date for the Loveland site at this time, but the chain “hopes” to wrap up construction before the end of the year, according to a press release announcing the new location.
Maizland said that he and his team gathered data from other municipalities with an In-N-Out in Colorado in conducting their review, and were able to generate some traffic projections. Their analysis focused both on the first 60 to 90 days after opening and on the long-term outlook for traffic to the site.
Maizland expects significant impacts during the initial rush of first-time and curious customers, but said that those will be mitigated by an on-site traffic plan that the developer will implement.
“I think we can all agree that the first several weeks after it opens, it’s going to be an absolute zoo out there, and there’s going be congestion and there’s going be backups, and there’s going to be complaints for sure,” he said. “But we do believe that those initial impacts from opening day and the several weeks after can be managed through a management plan.”
The plan could include message boards on U.S. 34, lane restrictions and In-N-Out staff directing drivers in the parking lot, he continued. There is also room to “stack” cars in the Centerra Marketplace parking lot, reducing the number of cars on the highway.
The city also made In-N-Outap submittal of a traffic management plan a condition of its certificate of occupancy, Maizland added.
As for the longer term outlook, Maizland said that after the initial crowds, the projected traffic to and from In-N-Out should become more manageable, with less impact to the public streets. Based on data from other locations, his team is projecting 1,800 trips per day to the location, with a peak of 200 at weekday lunch time.
Most of them will be using Fall River Drive to access the site from U.S. 34, Maizland projects, though the access point from Hahns Peak Drive is also expected to see more use.
“We’re pretty confident that once things settle down, most of the congestion is going to be in the parking lot itself and should not impact the rights of way negatively,” he said.
Should that confidence prove unfounded, Maizland explained that the city and CDOT have added conditions to their approval of the project. In-N-Outap developer must monitor traffic around the site for five years, and, if key performance metrics are missed, reimburse the city for any street or intersection improvements it makes to relieve congestion.
“If something happens that it’s not working well, we’re able to mitigate it,” he said.
