Delivery Drivers and Downtown Parking Continue to be at Odds

Emmett Sweeney drove for food delivery company DoorDash for around two years while he was attending Michigan State University.

“I was drawn to it because I could make my own hours,” he said. “I was a full time student so I was just trying to get beer money and pay rent, which was all I needed really back then. If rent was coming up, I would just hop on [the app] for a couple hours a night and try to make rent for a couple weeks and then call it good pretty much.”

Sweeney said that earning money as a DoorDash employee was all about time management — getting in and out of a restaurant as quickly as possible — and that it often led to him parking illegally.

“In the downtown area, that’s where I was picking up the most,” he said. “The HopCat and Panda Express area. HopCat, for example, I would park at 7-Eleven and only because HopCat was pretty good about having the food ready. You could get in and out of that parking spot in two minutes if you ran over quick enough. In the two years I was dashing, I never got a ticket, I never got towed. 

“I’ll fully admit it; I illegally parked a lot.”

When Sweeney was driving for the company — between 2020 and 2022— the base pay for drivers was $2.50 per order. He learned quickly how to make the system work for him.

“When you’re dashing, it’s terrible pay, so it was all about time management,” he said. “Early on, I pretty much accepted everything. But, after a few months, I kind of realized, ‘ok, this restaurant takes about 20 minutes to get the food ready,’ so I would never do that one again. If it was too far away and I wasn’t bringing an order over there, it was a wasted drive. It had to be close for a pick-up.

“When it popped up on your screen, sometimes it would tell you how much they tipped, so you could kind of infer what you’d be making. Other times, they would hide it so you didn’t have DoorDashers cherry-picking the good orders.”

These realities force delivery drivers for companies like DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Shipt, and Instacart to try to squeeze as many trips into an hour as possible.

Time is literally money.

But these shortcuts can result in consequences for business owners and pedestrians.

Ali Haider has owned the 7-Eleven at 311 Grove Street since 2016. He routinely deals with delivery drivers illegally parking in his customer-only lot. Haider will sometimes call the city’s Parking and Code Enforcement (PACE) officers to ticket drivers that are parked illegally in his business’ lot. 

“We are the only business in downtown East Lansing that offers free customer parking,” Haider told ELi in a phone conversation. “We actually have five parking [spots] in the front and two in the back. And if delivery drivers use our parking, we’re losing customers. The only option we have left is to ticket and tow. We hardly ever tow but we ticket. A ticket is $45, and a tow in East Lansing, due to city regulations and restrictions, we can only use a towing company that has an East Lansing address…and that’s H&H Mobile. They charge almost $300 a tow. So this delivery driver is going to get almost $350 dollars. He might not even make that in three days. That’s the thought that I have on a sympathy level. 

“But then when I look at it as customer service, our customers cannot come in because we have no spot for them.”

Haider also has to deal with angry drivers who return to their cars to see a ticket on their windshield.

“They make scenes,” he said. “Then we point out that we have four window signs, showing that even our customers can only park for 15 minutes max. And these [people] aren’t our customers. They’re running across the street to get food or coffee. We have coffee [in 7-Eleven].”

Mike Krueger, owner of both Crunchy’s at 254 W. Grand River Avenue and The Peanut Barrel at 521 E. Grand River Avenue has seen equally troubling and dangerous behavior in the alley behind the latter restaurant.

“At Peanut Barrel,” he said, “the issue is [delivery drivers] using the alley where a lot of people are walking, or walking out of buildings. The speed at which they drive down that alley and where they sometimes park right in front of restaurant doors, that’s really what the issue is and it’s frustrating. We’ve had multiple people, including myself, almost get hit by these cars in the alley. There’s little to no regard for the safety of people there. And to a certain extent, I get it. They’re working a job; they’re trying to get things done as quickly as possible. They’ve got to get to their next stop. 100% respect for the gig they’ve got going. But in that lot behind The Peanut Barrel, the city offers 15 minutes of free parking and even though it may take an extra 30 seconds to a minute to actually park in that lot, walk in, and get back out, as opposed to parking in the alley, I wish people would take more advantage of that because of the safety aspect.”

Krueger, who is also the chairperson of East Lansing’s Downtown Development Authority, said that enforcement of the rules regarding the alley is what’s needed, but understands that the city’s PACE officers are doing the best they can.

“A lot of it has come down to PACE not being fully staffed,” he said. “They can’t be everywhere at once.”

Scot Sexton has been the PACE supervisor for the past year and a half. Before that, he served as an East Lansing Police officer, a role he started in 1998.

“You always had the delivery stuff,” Sexton told ELi. “Back in the day, if you picked up your landline and you called Dominos and you ordered a pizza and if they delivered the pizza, delivered it to your house. The difference today is you have the Uber Eats, the DoorDash, and there’s probably more of them…and a lot of this obviously took off during Covid and it hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s stuck around. People are willing to pay that extra money for the convenience of not having to go to the store or the restaurant. 

“But the Little Caesars and the Hungry Howies have always been around, but they typically had their own parking lot so it wasn’t a problem.”

Sexton said that the inherent speed of the delivery drivers are what contributes to PACE’s inability to crack down on delivery drivers.

“They’ll park in front of the restaurant,” he said. “They’re usually pretty quick in and quick out. That makes it hard because the people who call, they’ll call and by the time the PACE officer gets there, they’re gone. And even if they do get there, the problem that we run into, me as a police officer, say I see you parked at Meijer and you’re parked in a handicapped parking spot.  Say I get out and I start writing you a ticket and you come out. As a police officer, I have the authority to say, ‘Wait, you can’t get into your car and take off until I’ve taken a reasonable amount of time to write this citation and give it to you.’ PACE officers are not cops so they do not have that authority. So the guy who’s doing the DoorDash sees the PACE pull up, grabs the food, and takes off before the PACE officer can finish writing the ticket. 

“Now, they could try to mail them the ticket, but the ticket would go to the registered owner. Because you run the plate and the plate comes back, just like me, I have a 17-year-old son right now [who’s] driving my wife’s car. Now, if he goes and parks in a handicapped spot, if they mail him a ticket, it’s going to go to me, not him. We try not to do that a lot because we don’t want parents getting tickets, or registered owners getting tickets.”

But it is staffing, Sexton said, which is the department’s biggest obstacle. PACE only has one full-time officer and that officer has the opportunity to pick their own shifts, typically choosing to work the “midnight shift” between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. The rest of the staff consists of four part-time employees who split their time between day and afternoon shifts.

These shortfalls in staffing make it hard to patrol the downtown area, a situation that has only gotten worse with the addition of the Target at 201 E. Grand River Avenue.

“It’s not Target’s fault,” Sexton said, “but a lot of people who come down there to shop think, ‘Well, I’m just getting one or two things,’ so they’ll park in the alley. I’ve even seen it where people will park at the 7-Eleven and walk over to Target and 7-Eleven will call us for what I just talked about, the private property parking. The owner there isn’t a private parking lot for Target or HopCat or Dave’s Hot Chicken. I think he gets very frustrated with that, as well. We get quite a few calls from 7-Eleven for parking enforcement. He’ll watch people pull in and park there and not even come into the store.

“I was covering the road patrol two weeks ago and I got the call to 7-Eleven. I was writing the ticket and here comes this girl with two Target bags. That’s not how this works. She didn’t understand; she really thought I was being mean. They need to be parking in the ramp.”

When Sexton dug into his records, he found that in September 2023, PACE had written 26 tickets for those illegally parked in the alley between Grand River and Albert Avenues. That number paled in comparison to the 553 parking tickets written throughout the city during the daily 2:00 to 6:00 p.m. shifts.

“I know there’s been complaints that when business owners have been back there, in the alley, they’ve seen PACE drivers just drive by,” he said. “What they do have to keep in mind is that they may be on their way to another call. They do actually get calls for service, they don’t just randomly patrol for parking tickets. They get a lot of calls for service. They get a lot of calls for private property parking. Envision that you live at the HUB at 918 East Grand River but you come home and there’s someone in your parking spot, in your private parking spot. That’s a common call for service that our PACE officers get. Honestly, they probably get 10 to 15 of those calls a day.”

If drivers, whether they be working as part of the gig economy or merely visiting downtown East Lansing, want to avoid tickets, Sexton said, they should avoid the alley and other private parking.

“Park in the ramp,” he said. “Delivery drivers can also use those green zones that are up on Albert.  They say ‘for deliveries;’ I think they’re in front of Barrio, they’re either pink or green, I can’t remember. Use those.”