I have a weak intuition that adding lanes to Alma and El Camino made the traffic problem worse, independently of the possible increase in traffic in the road. This is because it became impossible to do left turns into or out of the road, nor cross the road, without a traffic light, so they had to be installed at every intersection. Before the lane doubling, there was a slow-moving flow that was easy to navigate across, but after the lane doubling, there was either four lanes of high speed or a quadruple wall of cars. It also removed visibility because cars used to be able to pull out a bit before merging, but now they sit behind trees and pray nobody is coming in the right lane. Realizing this, the town tried to reverse or prevent Junipero Serra from being used as a fast double-lane road by installing a concrete serpentine across the middle and bike lane, with the obvious consequence of turning Saturday morning drives into a trolley problem. Good intention, but… maybe some paint instead. Sometimes I think Palo Alto might be a nicer place to live if the town lacked the budget to entertain new ideas.