I live about 2 miles away from Dulles but do almost all my flying out of Reagan National or BWI.

At Dulles, you wait for a bus to get from your car to the main terminal, struggle upstairs to the check-in area, and then you wait for ANOTHER bus to get from the main terminal to your flight. And then the whole thing is reversed when you return, and if your flight gets in around midnight or later, it can sometimes be as much as a half hour waiting for each of these bus runs. Add the waiting time for baggage claim (remembering that the baggage handlers have to drive a mile to get your bags from the plane to the claim area), and you've likely spent more time in the airport than in flight.

My favorite was when I took a USAirways commuter flight a couple of years ago that landed at Dulles. A bus picked us up at the plane, and dropped us off at one end of the midfield terminal. Then we walked almost all the way to the other end of the midfield terminal, where we waited for another bus to take us to the main terminal. Then we went downstairs, waited for our luggage, and then waited for another bus to take us to our car!

Dulles's 21st-century architecture is more than offset by its 19th-century functionality.