[1] Alternative names for this highway feature are Alemany Interchange and The Spaghetti Bowl.

The former US 101 Bypass, which followed Bayshore Boulevard to the south, separated from the old US 101 alignment at the Maze.

The word maze refers to the series of interchanges necessary for a vehicle to maneuver in order to navigate their way from a multi-lane freeway to a narrower distribution structure of lanes which funnel to connector exit ramps, similar to the better known MacArthur Maze.

Traffic reporters use these words combined with the Alemany Maze to indicate its bottleneck status.

[7] The San Francisco Chronicle has described it as "a spaghetti tangle of freeway" which "[l]ike a tentacled octopus [...] stretches north to the Bay Bridge and south to Daly City and San Francisco International Airport, with prongs swooshing in every direction".