For six months, retired journalist Dave Statter has been taking video from his apartment perched above I-395, his camera trained on one of the most dangerous exits in the region. Exit 8C to Route 1 in Crystal City has become famous for all the wrong reasons.

His video posts documenting boneheaded driving maneuvers have taken off on Twitter.

“People were doing crazy things to get to that ramp,” Statter said. “They were stopping in the middle of traffic because they were about to miss the left-hand exit and they would cross four lanes… I was watching near misses, I was watching crashes happen.

“I just don’t know where people learned to drive that way.”

https://twitter.com/STATter911/status/1532526989826990084

And there are dozens of these videos. Statter says he sees people stop in traffic or make harrowing moves daily.

Part of the problem is that some drivers coming from Boundary Channel Drive have just 300 feet to try to cross the entire interstate.

“There’s no doubt that some are just following their GPS,” Statter says. Waze changed its algorithm months ago to discourage this type of movement, according to the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT). Statter is unsure if Google Maps and Apple Maps have done the same.

It’s unclear why drivers won’t simply just take the next exit and circle back. Statter says this section of interstate is old — from 1941 when the Pentagon was under construction. It wasn’t built to handle today’s traffic.

His tweets caught the attention of VDOT officials, who just this week put out traffic barrels to discourage such erratic maneuvers. More permanent flex posts will be going in soon. It hasn’t fully kicked bad behavior, yet, as shown by the video below in which a driver waits nearly a minute stopped in traffic to try to make the exit.

https://twitter.com/STATter911/status/1534278552396484608

Ellen Kamilakis, a spokesperson for VDOT’s Northern Virginia division, says Statter’s videos showed egregious, unsafe driving with “absolutely no concern for anybody else’s safety.”

VDOT is now adding new signage to note the left exit, hoping that it will give drivers an earlier heads up.

And starting this summer, VDOT will launch a new year-long construction project to completely re-do the interchange. The $20 million project will install roundabouts on Boundary Channel Drive just west and east of I-395 and reconfigure the ramps there, ultimately eliminating the dangerous ramp, Kamilakis says. A new ramp will give drivers four times more space to get over, expanding the distance between ramps from 300 feet to 1,200 feet.

“It’s supposed to definitely streamline the flow of traffic,” she said. “You’re not having a bunch of people stopping because they’re trying to make it across in a tiny space between two exits.”

The project should be done fall 2023. Statter says he thinks VDOT is moving in the right direction by making exit safer, but he thinks there will still be plenty of hijinks to watch even after the change.

“Sadly, I think there is a problem with the driver of today, many of them who are in it from themselves and don’t think about the people around them … I think there will always be people doing crazy things.”