Before the new interchange was built, traffic was rarely backed up as far as it is now when heading east on Willow towards 101. I hope the permanent signals improve the current situation.

Why is it that when new interchanges are built on 101 along the Peninsula, there don't seem to be any improvements to the flow or safety of traffic and often the changes seem to cause more problems. Huge waste of money.

They were installed awhile ago and were *supposed* to be activated on the 27th, but that didn't seem to happen (they were still off when I drove through this morning).

The other day traffic was backed up 100 yards south into Palo Alto on middlefield and 50 yards north on middlefield. 2 traffic lights will not improve the situation for all those cars that take 20 minutes to go 2 miles to 101. No police anywhere as the intersection was blocked, cars honking horns as motorcycles flew east up the bike lane as they passed all the cars and endangered bicyclists and those trying to get out of their driveways. Job well done Menlo Park

Traffic in the evening is backing up on the side streets entering Willow West of 101 (Chester, Durham and O'Keefe). So far this interchange problem has just added more problems and I expect when it is done it will result in much longer delays for people trying to get onto Willow (west bound) from 101 North. I love that Caltrans is spending hundreds of millions of tax dollars to make a problem worse.

The morning commute got worse and the evening commute is a nightmare. People are cutting each other off and everyone looks pissed. This made everything worse. The extra light in the middle of willow was a really bad idea. Its very tragic that the city spent 70 million dollars on this counter productive idea. Traffic is at its worst. Where exactly was it supposed to improve? The commuters have no choice but to use the side streets and even that's bad now. As a resident of Menlo Park, this made my commute a whole lot worse than it needed to be.

Just imagine what this is doing to emergency response times!!

The implementation of these new lights was obviously done with no understanding of or consideration for the traffic patterns. The morning traffic on Willow eastbound to 101 is completely gridlocked. I can't even imagine how the evening traffic is now. The light at Bay Road and the one just prior to 101 are completely asynchronous, and the light at 101 does not let sufficient traffic through. Whoever engineered this has shown an incredible amount of incompetence.

I wholeheartedly agree with all the previous comments. The new system is a nightmare, and seems to be making the traffic situation worse (vs. improving things, as was the intent). As a Suburban Park resident, I still take the Willow Road onramp to 101 - which people are confused by, as it has changed - on my morning commute. But in the evenings, I refuse to sit and wait in the long line of cars on 101 for the new Willow Road offramp. Instead, I've been using the Marsh Road exit, which adds a bit of time to my trip home, but at least I'm still moving and not sitting in gridlock.

Keyword here is TEMPORARY. The new interchange will be much wider and have more capacity. Once again this is TEMPORARY. Oh and build more housing and integrated public transit.

PS - thanks Baby Boomers! You aren't called the ME generation for nothin'!

MPer:

in case you haven't noticed us "baby boomers" are starting to die off. I'm 59 and at the back end of the boom. The front end are 72. After the wave passes through (very, very many of which aren't even working at this point and thus not contributing to commute traffic) and the panic to expand freeways is done, I predict there will be a bunch of excess capacity. Unless, we continue to allow immigration as we have and that grows the population. (Hint: it will). So you can blame "baby boomers" all you want, but we may be the front end of the problem, we're not the end.