Originally Posted by
Artagnan
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.
Most of the downtown stops will be on the silver line, while relatively few are on the yellow line. It will also be nonstop on the Silver line from Arlington, when today it requires a transfer @ Rosslyn to the Blue. So the transfer logic, depending on where you live in the city, actually inflates the times to DCA for more than it does IAD.
It's not opening all the way to IAD until 2018 anyway though, so I'm not viewing that as a game changer for the next few years.
I live much closer to DCA, so I prefer DCA, but the range perimeter limitations mean that a lot of my flights, if I want nonstop, end up being out of IAD. I view the time getting to IAD as preferable to transferring in Charlotte or Chicago.
Also, as mentioned before - United also has regular flights to the Newark, Chicago, Cleveland, and Houston hubs that aren't covered by the range limit. United's service there isn't terrible, schedule-wise. It's just expensive, to drive passengers to the cheaper IAD operation. I'm mostly okay with that.