Hah yeah we do this going from 101 to 880 north pretty often and it’s wild how much time it can shave. That entire interchange is the worst designed I’ve seen.

Texas had to go one better – inverted cloverleafs (stack interchanges) complete with service (frontage) roads

Clovers work well if there's like 3 cars using it at any given point in time.

City I used to fly into for work eventually rebuilt an intire intersection (pretty major one for the area) to remove it. Had to be a real bitch to do. It was a huge upgrade.

Wasn't a giant concrete monstrosity, which I'd imagine would be worse.

Yeah, why are clovers so wide-spread over there? We have almost none here.

to be 9 AM to 5 AM

I know this is a typo but I found it hilarious to think you were recommending 20 hour shifts as an improvement.

I don’t, my day us shifted, so I commute later, instead of like an hour and a half my commute is 50 minutes (which is still a lot for a European) but in exchange I live in my hometown

Years ago I worked with a guy who had a roughly 20 mile commute that was about 19 miles on a major highway that choked during rush hour. He worked from home in the early morning then drove in starting after 10:00. He’d then head home around 6:00 PM or later. He said traffic was almost always light.

He also never listened to traffic reports on TV or the radio. One day he got on the highway and was surprised to find traffic was virtually non-existent. He got about half way to the office to find the highway had been completely shut down due to a fuel tanker that was on fire…

One word answer: families.

I used to go to work along a road that had a two-lane roundabout. One lane turns left and one lane turns right (in this country, we drive on the left for context)

The left lane was always banked up many many cars, but the right lane wasn't.

So I'd go bomb down in the right lane and do a 270 degree turn to end up going left, where the banked-up left-turning cars had to yield to me.

That's a pro gamer move.

I swear bro just one more lane it'll fix all your traffic issues just one more bro please

Induced demand.

Three factors for this that I'm aware of:

1. The whole road system needs to be able to handle the throughput from all sources to all destinations in aggregate. That means if you relieve one bottleneck, it increases the rate that traffic can reach the roads on the other side of the former bottleneck, which can cause them to exceed capacity. Eg, if you have a 5 lane highway reduce to 3 lanes and jams frequently form at (and leading up to) the lane reduction sites, traffic will likely flow ok in those 3 lanes and then really open up if it goes to 4. But if they extend the 5 lanes to where it goes to 4, there will now likely be a jam where traffic used to flow decently where it was 3 lanes, and that "really opens up" also gets downgraded to "flows decently".
2. Intersections are horrible once the exceed capacity, especially if there's any potential for starvation in the way they cycle, as that can result in not just a jam but grid lock. Starvation in this context means a vehicle never gets their turn to proceed through the intersection in the way they desire. People waiting for their turn that will never come back up as more queue up and eventually start blocking the other paths through the intersection and other intersections leading there start also seeing starvation and eventually you need a person to go direct traffic to get things flowing again. Grid lock is when all paths get starved and will just continue backing up until everyone who wants to go to the gridlocked area is stuck in traffic that isn't moving at all. It's also why it's illegal to stop inside an intersection because then you start starving any lanes you block. Anyways, adding a new road or lanes can suddenly cause an intersection downroad to exceed capacity.
3. More onramps/offramps on a highway increase turbulence as people need to change lanes, especially in those cases where the lane you enter on immediately exits, as you get both people wanting to join and leave that lane in a short area. Turbulence creates traffic waves as traffic alternates between slowing down as people are forced to brake for lane changers having trouble moving over, and the slowdown effectively increases the road capacity (ahead of it, behind it has effective reduced capacity), so those at the front can immediately speed up, but since these affect different lanes at different rates, the lane weavers try to move to the fastest lanes and create more turbulence, sometimes it all adds up to bring some of the traffic to a complete stop. The same thing happens when people try to skip the queue and force their way into the backed up lane at the last moment.

Asshole drivers make bad traffic situations way worse than they need to be. But road systems are a lot more complex than they seem to be. It's like fluid dynamics but even more complex because each driver has a different will (and agression, competence, etc) and it's several ton vehicles that break if they touch each other acting as the basic particles instead of particles that usually move past each other relatively easily.

Does this help?

I understand why

I don't :(

Edit: I mean I see the other long sweepy road for northbound to turn left, but why is that like that but clovers for the other three directions to turn left?

It's common in areas where there's a lot of undeveloped land when it's built.

Otherwise it's the most expensive by far because it takes a fuckton of land.