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I'm not sure the east of central Edinburgh really needs a drive through coffee shop but there you go, free car parking don't make enough money for investment funds that own them so they want to wring more out of them
(That's Meadowbank Retail Park by the way, and this is the full application https://citydev-portal.edinburgh.gov.uk/idoxpa-web/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=documents&keyVal=QFNSUWEWJOV00)
At some point in the late nineties or noughties this place probably seemed like a good idea, but its been mainly tenanted by pound shops ever since and much of the trade is on foot, so the oversized car park is usually 75% empty.
The designers of course imagined everyone would arrive by car, which is why the best routes on foot in or out are to cut diagonally across the car park. The footways are designed only to get you from the car park to the shop door
So fundamentally this planning application says "this development won't have any impact on traffic, congestion or pollution because of our modelling, but we can build on this car park because our previous modelling about traffic was *way* off, so just trust us, yeah"
