For a town that wants to promote walkability, the Barrington Shopping Center is a glaring failure, and the new Starbucks drive-through lane only amplifies that.

The Barrington Shopping Center’s connection to the East Bay Bike Path — channeling bicyclists and walkers into a vehicle travel lane — is not good to begin with. The newly “improved” design, introduced this week with the opening of the coffee shop drive-through, makes things worse.

The bike path connector is a sidewalk that cuts not once, but twice, through the queued up cars in the Starbucks drive-through lane. In what civil engineering design class would this be considered a good idea?

If we widen the focus here, we realize that this shopping center, which is the only of its kind in town and a central hub for many of Barrington’s residents, has never been pedestrian-friendly. Shoppers at Shaw’s rarely park there and walk to any other destinations in that plaza, and vice versa. Why would they? There are no inviting, or safe, paths to travel.

In fact, the shopping center actually feels more like two, or even three, separate plazas, with Shaw’s in the west zone, a diverse collection of businesses in the east zone, and an isolated strip on the north side, alongside the bike path, that has almost no connection to the rest of the shops. And that strip, which is home to a busy fitness center, appliance store, dry cleaner, salon and soon-to-be wildly popular restaurant, is even more disconnected than ever — thanks again to the coffee-shop drive-through. Pedestrians who were once able to walk a sidewalk along the west side of that building must now circle, and then cut through, the drive-through traffic to get anywhere else in the plaza.

It is quite typical to see shoppers drive to the center and re-park their cars three times within a 100-yard radius on a single shopping trip. Contrast that with a smartly designed center like Garden City in Cranston, where it is typical for shoppers to park once and stroll for a mile among scores of shops before returning to their vehicles.

To make matters worse in Barrington, whether the businesses welcome this or not, this shopping center is a popular destination for many of the pre-driving, young teens in Barrington. This is group who rarely socializes like they did a generation ago, but they will frequently text to their friends, “meet me at the center.”

They ride their bikes or walk a short distance to arrive at a gathering place that is neither friendly nor safe for them.

The big miss here is that many of these problems could have been remedied, or at least improved, when the owner of the shopping center approached the town and asked for permission to build a drive-through lane that most people either objected to, or were wary of. He needed a special use permit for the drive-through lane, and the people of Barrington needed a safer, more pedestrian-friendly shopping center.

He got his permit. The people of Barrington got nothing in return. Why?

After all, the creation of a drive-through lane is a move away from walkability and toward idling vehicles and more traffic. How did the town gain so little in this negotiation?

For a town that prides itself on not having had a pedestrian fatality in more than 60 years, this was a missed opportunity that is not likely to return. The town had its leverage. It does no longer.