They call it “target fixation” or “screen fixation.” That’s when you’re so obsessed with following the advanced digital readout in the cockpit of your attack jet that you don’t notice the mountain looming right in front of you.

       Wp Get the full experience.Choose your plan ArrowRight

       Today we can all experience target fixation in the comfort of own vehicles, when we blindly turn our driving route over to the map apps on our phones. Who are you gonna believe? GPS or your own two eyes?

       Dave Statter sees this play out every day from his high-rise apartment in Crystal City. The former newsman has video cameras trained on I-395 below. In March, I wrote about how, time and time again, Dave sees cars making the same dangerous move: cutting nearly perpendicularly across four lanes of interstate traffic to get from Boundary Channel Drive to a left exit onto Route 1 South.

       He thinks a lot of those drivers are steered wrong by their GPS. Dave has re-created driving directions on Google Maps that suggest taking that route. I’ve done the same with Apple’s Maps app. Waze apparently addressed the issue long ago, in part thanks to a man named Alan Boyd.

       By day, Alan is a contractor for a Navy program. In the evenings, he’s among the volunteers who keep Waze as updated as possible.

       Advertisement

       “There’s a small little group of people who help out in the area,” said Alan, who is a Virginia state manager for Waze.

       Alan said Waze has not recommended that dicey, four-lane move since 2014.

       VDOT’s Ellen Kamilakis said the agency is aware of Dave Statter’s videos and is working to improve that stretch of road.

       “As we have done in the past, we reached out to Waze, who verified that drivers who enter I-395 at Boundary Channel Drive are not instructed to immediately cross multiple lanes of traffic to use the Route 1 exit ramp,” she wrote in an email. “We also reached out to Google to request that that movement be prevented in Google Maps.”

       Though Waze is owned by Google, Alan said it can take some time for the changes he suggests to the Waze app to show up on Google. A Google spokesperson tells me its routing has been updated.

       Advertisement

       “We take a wide range of factors into account to deliver driving routes — including road size, directness and estimated travel time,” Google emailed in a statement. “After investigating, we’ve updated the route in question on I-395. As always, we encourage everyone to stay alert and attentive when on the road.”

       Apple did not respond to my requests for comment.

       Alan lives in Lorton and drives throughout the D.C./Maryland/Virginia area. When I last checked, he was the fifth-most active volunteer editor on Waze, which relies on crowdsourcing. He’s always monitoring the latest traffic wrinkles. Friday evenings are reserved for sitting at his computer and poring through news releases issued by VDOT about various road closures and detours.

       While Alan is helping other Waze users, he’s also helping himself.

       Advertisement

       “It helps me by making it so that it's more efficient for me driving around in the area,” he said. “I don't go to an exit and it's no longer there.”

       Waze users can report problems they encounter by clicking the orange circle in the lower-right corner of their screen, then clicking on “Map issue.”

       Dave Statter hopes alterations to GPS programs will cut down on that cross-lane maneuver.

       “I think it will particularly affect those who don't know the area at all,” he said.

       Even so, he’s noticed that some of the worst offenders are the drivers of hotel courtesy shuttles, who should know better.

       What seems to help, Dave said, is when an Arlington County police car parks in the gore zone near the Route 1 South exit. That dissuades the risky behavior.

       Bad design should get some of the blame. Left exits are always tricky, since that’s where the fast lanes are meant to be. There’s only about a football field’s length between the Boundary Channel Drive entrance and the Route 1 exit. That’s doable if there’s absolutely no traffic, foolhardy when there is traffic. It’s just enticing enough for some drivers.

       Advertisement

       Changes are in store for this nasty bit of pavement.

       “In the long term, the Boundary Channel Drive at I-395 Interchange Improvements project will reconfigure the ramps at I-395 and Boundary Channel Drive, extending the distance between the Boundary Channel Drive entrance ramp and the Route 1 exit ramp from 300 feet to 1,150 feet,” wrote Ellen from VDOT. “This project is set to begin construction this summer.”

       Alan thinks map apps get a bad rap, scapegoated by drivers who have only themselves to blame.

       “In all truthfulness, it’s a lot easier when they do something silly to say ‘My GPS told me to do it,’ even though the GPS doesn’t do it,” he said.

       What all drivers should remember is: If it looks like a bad move, it probably is.