Class Action Filed Over Allegedly Excessive Slopes in Taco Bell Parking Lots

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A proposed class action claims that the operators of hundreds of Taco Bell restaurants have failed to ensure that their parking lots are equally accessible to customers with mobility disabilities.

According to the 13-page case, defendants Charter Foods, Inc. and Charter Central, LLC, who operate 258 Taco Bell locations across 12 states, have unlawfully failed to address excessive sloping conditions in their restaurants’ purportedly accessible parking spots, access aisles and curb ramps.

The lawsuit alleges that the supposedly widespread nature of the accessibility barriers in the defendants’ Taco Bell parking lots, in particular at locations in Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, suggests that the conditions are a result of inadequate internal maintenance procedures.

The case looks to order the defendants to address the excessive sloping conditions in their restaurants’ parking lots and change their policies, practices and procedures to ensure that the areas remain complaint with the sloping requirements set by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

The plaintiff, a Frankfort, Kentucky resident who uses a wheelchair for mobility, says he visited a Lexington Taco Bell in September 2021 and experienced “unnecessary difficulty and risk of physical harm” while getting out of and into his vehicle and navigating the parking lot due to excessive sloping conditions. Per the case, the defendants’ failure to design and maintain their Taco Bell parking lots in compliance with the ADA “significantly impeded” the plaintiff’s ability to access the restaurant—a place of public accommodation—and constitutes discrimination against consumers with mobility disabilities.

The lawsuit relays that the plaintiff’s investigators examined several of the defendants’ Taco Bell locations and discovered the following conditions:

• Purportedly accessible parking surfaces with slopes exceeding 2.1 percent;
• A curb ramp that projected into an access aisle; and
• A purportedly accessible curb ramp with a running slope exceeding 8.33 percent.

According to the case, these alleged ADA violations illustrate that the defendants’ policies, practices and procedures are “discriminatory, unreasonable, inadequate, and routinely result in excessive sloping conditions in the parking spaces, accessible routes, and curb ramps.”

The lawsuit looks to cover all wheelchair users with qualified mobility disabilities who were denied full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages or accommodations of any of the defendants’ Taco Bell locations in the U.S. on the basis of disability because they encountered accessibility barriers due to the companies’ failure to comply with the ADA’s slope regulations within the restaurants’ parking areas. 

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