With its fallen bridges and reconstructed highways sucking up so much attention, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (DOT) has a significant caseload of high-level distractions. A couple of intersections in Barrington and Riverside would seem to be far down the priority list.

Yet those intersections somehow landed on an engineer’s radar for radical reimagining, with dubious judgment, backed by utter failure in execution.

The first is in west Barrington, where Barrington’s County Road transitions into Riverside’s Willett Avenue, and they share a T intersection with Washington Road. Forever, there has been a familiar traffic pattern, where motorists traveling east-west on the County-Willett pathway had an uninterrupted flow as they traveled across the town line in either direction. Motorists traveling away from the perpendicular Washington Road, whether heading east or west, were forced to yield before moving into the main roadway.

The same was true of motorists switching from County Road (heading west) onto Washington Road. They had to yield to oncoming traffic before moving onto Washington.

Then came the radical reimagining in late summer. In the blink of an eye, DOT decided this perfectly functioning intersection should actually be labeled a “roundabout.” And in roundabouts, any motorist who is within the roundabout has the right-of-way.

The designation is odd; the judgment is flawed. Driver instinct and intuition, not to mention generations of habit, favor the historically familiar traffic pattern.

The result of the radical reimagining is that every merger in the entire intersection has been altered 180 degrees. Everyone who had the right of way, no longer does. Everyone who was in the secondary position, now has the right of way.

Then comes the utter failure — though it’s unclear who failed more here, DOT or the Town of Barrington. It seems like both may share equally. The public notification for the radical reimagining of the convergence of two major roadways was … to send a DOT worker with a shovel, to dig up and slightly reposition the “Yield” signs.

So in the blink of the eye, an entire roadway intersection was radically altered, with little to no communication or notification to the public. No temporary, flashing signs. No warnings of an altered traffic pattern. No communication from the town. Nothing.

Since then, motorists have been traversing at their own peril, never sure if their fellow drivers are aware of and following the new pattern or the old one. Confusion is common. Near-accidents are a daily occurrence.

Though a slightly different configuration exists less than a mile west, at the merge of Willett Avenue and Crescent View Avenue (where the roads swirl around Town Pizza) in Riverside, the same choices were made. The historic traffic pattern was radically changed. The area was classified as a roundabout. And every right-of-way in the entire area was changed 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

The difference in Riverside is that the mayor of East Providence advocated for this change, and his city robustly publicized it to residents.

It appears nothing similar occurred in Barrington, where generations of drivers are learning about a new traffic pattern that makes no sense, for which they had no warning or explanation.