The idea of a bar (ie a place people go to get drunk) with a dedicated parking lot strikes me as particularly bad for road safety. I'm baffled that this is not only encouraged, but mandated.
How do people do this in practice? Just drink and drive and hope they don't crash / get fined? Or does everybody bring 1 friend who sips colas the whole night?
Parking lots are not mandated for bars in the US, at least not everywhere. I helped my girlfriend's dad open a bar in Long Beach 20 years ago. The city required us to pay for the maintenance of three streetside parking spaces, but that was it. Pay the city. We didn't have to build anything that didn't already exist.
>Parking lots are not mandated for bars in the US, at least not everywhere.
This, they are making the mistake that all the people on /r/askamerican do over on reddit. Laws like this mostly aren't nationwide or even statewide, they are decided on a very local level.
We call the latter a designated driver [1] though as you can imagine sometimes the designated driver is "only" slightly drunk.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_driver