'Ghost kitchen' traffic upsets neighbors — a lot. LA is now looking for solutions

Drivers whipping around U-turns, clogged streets, and the kind of parking from your nightmares.

That’s how neighbors described a busy stretch of Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood after the 2021 opening of a ghost kitchen, the new type of commercial kitchen designed to produce high volumes of food for pickup and delivery.

The situation in North Hollywood reportedly improved once the neighborhood established a exclusion zone around the ghost kitchen to spread out app-based food couriers until they clinched an order.

The Los Angeles City Council now is considering adopting this solution citywide.

Council members passed a motion at the end of July asking city staff to draft a policy establishing the same kind of zones around ghost kitchens across L.A.

Councilman Hugo Soto-Martínez, who represents neighborhoods from Silverlake and Echo Park through Hollywood, led the motion. He said he receives complaints about ghost kitchens in his district “every single day.”

“In my district and across the city, we are seeing ghost kitchens pop up in areas that were not built to handle hundreds of vehicles coming in and out, idling in neighborhoods, causing nuisances to neighborhoods, backing up traffic, and creating unsafe conditions for people walking or driving around the area,” Soto-Martínez said at a July 30 council meeting.

Food app delivery companies and restaurant industry leaders caution against a blanket policy for ghost kitchens, arguing exclusion zones citywide would harm workers and small business owners while encouraging community-tailored solutions.

Once the city council’s transportation committee receives the report about the draft policy, as well as ideas on pilot programs and associated costs, local lawmakers will have the option to make amendments and recommendations. There are a lot of details that would need to be worked out in this process, including how expansive the exclusion zones would be and how the city would work with delivery app companies to institute them.

North Hollywood offers an example

James Askew, vice president of the North Hollywood Neighborhood Council, said the Lankershim Boulevard ghost kitchen, which services major restaurants, including Chick-fil-A, goop Kitchen, and Wingstop, brought a tense energy to the neighborhood.

“There were actual fist fights between drivers …  fighting over which one of them was gonna get a parking space,” Askew said.

Hayk Shahinyan owns a tech repair store across the street from the ghost kitchen on Lankershim Boulevard and said his customers would walk in dumbfounded by the crowds outside.

“They would ask us, ‘Who are those people? Is there a concert outside? What's going on?’” Shahinyan said. “We're like, ‘No, these are just food delivery drivers.’”

Neighbors and local business owners brought their concerns to the neighborhood council and Council District 2, formerly represented by Paul Krekorian and now represented by Adrin Nazarian.

After several meetings and calls with business owners and Uber and DoorDash, the neighborhood established an exclusion zone bounded by Collins Street and Burbank Boulevard.

The Department of Transportation increased parking enforcement in the area until the problem abated, and the Department of Sanitation added six garbage cans to minimize littering.

Though it never was easy to find a spot on that stretch of Lankershim Boulevard, parking has improved since the exclusion zone went into effect in May, according to Adriana Zuniga, owner of Cara Vana Coffee Shop.

“They know where to stand, and [there isn’t] a chaotic mess with parking,” Zuniga said.

Shahinyan said he doesn’t blame the delivery drivers themselves for the congestion.

“They're here just to make their daily living,” he said, adding that he thinks it's the responsibility of the food delivery app companies to “not cause inconvenience to other businesses” around ghost kitchens.

Jillian Burgos, the president of the North Hollywood Neighborhood Council, said the goal is to “support everyone trying to make a living in Los Angeles.”

“We understand that gig jobs help essential workers make ends meet and offer flexibility, but we must also ensure that businesses support their neighbors, as well,” Burgos said in an email.

In Echo Park, residents are fed up

Suzanne Hollingshead said her small street in Echo Park was already congested. When a ghost kitchen that serves nearly 30 restaurants opened on the corner in 2023, Hollingshead said her quality of life plummeted. There are now cars double parked in red zones and blocking fire hydrants, and she said she even sees bottles of urine lining the street because food couriers don’t have adequate access to facilities.

Hollingshead said she’s “skeptical” about the exclusion zones and worries that will just push the problems to a neighboring street.

“I  have friends that are on other blocks,” Hollingshead said. “I don't want this happening to them either.”

Ideally, if a ghost kitchen–or as Hollingshead describes it, the “mini mall mega business”–exists, it should be elsewhere altogether and not on a residential street that lacks proper signage or crosswalks for safety, she said.

Not a one-size-fits-all solution, app companies say

An Uber spokesperson said the company is “committed to working together on a solution that addresses neighborhood concerns, while also protecting the delivery services that local restaurants, small businesses, and customers use every day and the earning opportunities that couriers rely on.”

The spokesperson said the company already is reducing parking and traffic congestion by using tools like order batching, which allows a delivery person to pick up and deliver multiple orders in one trip. The spokesperson also said loitering indicates there are more delivery people than there are orders and pointed to how it’s worked in large cities, including London and Paris, to balance supply and demand.

A DoorDash spokesperson said “one-size-fits-all proposals” don’t always work as intended and could harm "working-class Dashers and the local businesses our communities rely on.”

“We hope the Council will work with us to craft smarter, targeted solutions that better address the root of these issues and create new opportunities, rather than restrictions, for those already struggling to get by," the DoorDash spokesperson said.

Lily Rocha, executive director of the Latino Restaurant Association, shared the same sentiment.

Rocha wrote in a public comment that exclusion zones could unintentionally increase delivery times and costs and reduce the take-home pay of drivers.

“Implementing exclusion zones on a large scale is untested and may not even be feasible. No other city has attempted a policy of this kind, and there is no evidence to suggest that delivery platforms could comply effectively or equitably with such a regulation,” Rocha wrote.

Instead, Rocha said stakeholders should work together to find “solutions that are fit for each community.”

Other solutions

Another motion moving its way through L.A. city government takes issue with how ghost kitchens are zoned as catering companies rather than having a unique land use definition.

“Catering land uses prepare food in large batches for a few scheduled deliveries,” the motion, also led by Soto-Martínez, reads. “‘Ghost Kitchens’ prepare individual take-out orders on demand, with high-volume orders, causing higher impacts on local streets.”

Shahinyan said he doesn’t understand why a ghost kitchen, which doesn’t involve customers entering and ordering food, has a storefront alongside typical retail businesses.

“ They can be located somewhere, like a warehouse type of place where they have [a] big parking lot for their employees, first of all, and then for their independent contractor drivers,” he said.

Burgos said there’s other property in the neighborhood with dedicated parking that could better suit the ghost kitchen, as opposed to a storefront “meant for small businesses.“

“The popularity of the ghost kitchen has grown beyond the capacity of the space,” Burgos said.