Originally Posted by
IAD22066
IAD will be fifteen stops away from Washington DC when the rest of the Silver line is completed. I don't know how long that trip will take but I can't imagine anyone in DC taking that trip unless they are doing international travel and can't get a ride. A cab costs about $60.
Assuming that you start at Union Station (where Amtrak arrives; relatively in the middle of the downtown core), it will take you 52 minutes to get to Wiehle-Reston East, which is the furthest stop that will open as part of Phase 1 of the Silver Line. Dulles itself will be four stops beyond that, so it will be over an hour from Downtown DC to IAD via Metro. An extremely long haul, considering that Union Station to DCA is 22 minutes. (Ride time data from WMATA's website.)
However, even this difference is misleading, because if you're at a downtown stop directly on the Yellow Line (e.g. Gallery Place), you don't have to transfer, and your ride is only 13 minutes, whereas your ride without a transfer to IAD would still be somewhere in the range of 55 minutes to just over an hour. In other words, transferring inflates the travel time disproportionally because the ride is so short.