It’s a doddle. You just go round in circles.
I can actually see how that would not only work, but actually be quite easy to use. It’s like a big roundabout which you don’t have to drive all the way round, you are sort of driving to the ‘right’ of the main island in order to go up the road on the top left, from the road at the bottom.
Slowly.
The magic roundabout is really just a ring system of ordinary roundabouts connected by very short roads - that you can appear, in using it, to be driving around a roundabout in anticlockwise direction is pretty much an illusion.
What’s really cool about it is that there are two different paths through it for any route.
An infinite number of paths, surely? 
Clearly a fake. They’re driving on the left side of the road!
I cringed a couple times, but it’s still nifty. If it works, we’d be retarded to not have them.
I actually drive across this twice a day as part of my commute - not nearly so scary as it looks, as per the descriptions upthread. You just approach each mini roundabout in turn.
Bah. “The Stack” is easy.
East L.A. Interchange, not so easy.
That’s what I meant when I said, “There are others that are more confusing.” The real problem with the East Los Interchange is you have to make drastic lane changes to get where you want, and unsuspecting drivers often end up going up the 5 because they couldn’t get over to the 10 in time. Then you have a real problem because you have no idea where to get off and get back on the right track. You usually end up wandering around poorly marked, unlit side streets with lots of strip clubs and no idea where to go. It’s also a favorite place for taggers.
But “The Stack” has its own name, and they actually made a picture postcard of it.
Yes. A picture postcard of a freeway interchange.
I don’t even understand the map. God only knows what it must be like actually driving on it.
The blog post is here: Georgia Clean Air Campaign | Savvy Atlanta
While it’s stated to be Spaghetti Junction it clearly isn’t. Google Maps.
Note the high ramps above the top freeway deck.
The pic doesn’t look at all like any interchange around Atlanta. It doesn’t even look real. (And the traffic is never that light during dayling hours.)
Oh, and with the new interchange, the weaving has been eliminated.
Some of the info above is wrong. The Triboro Bridge may be mentioned on the Grand Central Parkway signs, but the bridge itself is over ten miles from this intersection. The other highway that converges here is the Van Wyck Expressway. The Clearview is about 4 miles from this intersection, and the Northern State is what the Grand Central becomes at the Nassau border about 7 miles east. There are no els in this area, but there is an LIRR line nearby.
Spaghetti Junction in Atlanta looks confusing, but really isn’t. It’s just a way to connect all the crazy exits and entrances into both those highways. When you’re actually driving it, it’s fine. From the side, it looks a LOT crazier than from the top. Though it’s not the craziest looking interchange in Atlanta. Try where 85 and 285 hit on the southside!
It’s a similar story with its British namesake - Google Maps
The reason for that junction seeming a bit loony, taken from Wikipedia: ‘Underneath the motorway junction are the meeting points of local roads; the rivers Tame, Rea and the Hockley Brook; electricity lines; gas pipelines; the Cross-City and Walsall railway lines, and Salford Junction where the Grand Union Canal, Birmingham and Fazeley Canal and Tame Valley Canal meet.’
This could explain why driver and I got hopelessly lost. We were trying to get to Long Island City. Yahoo maps said 9W to Grand Central Parkway West. We ended up in Flushing.
Just past the exit for the Interboro is where it gets all Jetson-y.
P.S. How can you see that all the way from Kentucky?
I am humbled.
I thought that triangle-ish area where the NJ Turnpike, the Garden State Parkway, I287, and Routes 1&9 converge was the worst. But it’s not even a single interchange! It’s just a bunch of weird and annoying and frequently confusing interchanges that are close to one another. I see now that it’s small potatoes.
(Though I do find myself involuntarily in Perth Amboy more often than I’d like to admit.)
33 years as a New Yorker (4 of them about 3 miles from that interchange) will do that to ya.
this place is fairly confusing too: I don’t think I’ve gotten lost in the place you are mentioning, despite the fact that there is not one but two of the biggest roads in the state share New Jersey nick/names. But I have had a hard time following the expressway on my link.
But my overall choice: This pleasant interchange south of DC where, northbound, you exit right to turn left onto the beltway, and exit left to turn right onto the beltway.
I drive that confluence of highways daily (I call it “the blender” but I don’t know anyone else who does.) The major problem is not the interchanges themselves (which are uncommonly well marked for NYC) but the complete failure of maps to represent it accurately.
For instance, for about 1/2 an exit, Union Turnpike and the JRP actually run parallel - with the JRP on the 4 sub street lanes and Union Turnpike on the street level. You will not find the represented on most maps – instead they show Union Turnpike intersecting the JRP. If they do try to represent it, the detail is lost and it is very hard to understand what’s going on. This leads to widespread confusion as people try and fail to understand what the map is telling them vs. what they are seeing with their eyes.