Nobody brings rail closer to the airplanes than Reagan National and Metro.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

It’s late afternoon, and I’m standing inside New York’s JFK airport with over a dozen of my favorite relatives, when we suddenly learn that the flight to Reagan National has been canceled due to a severe weather system in the nation’s capital. Even worse, the storm has knocked out the rest of the day’s flights as well.

As frequent travelers know, when weather grounds planes, there’s no free ride and no free hotel— just the prospect of lining up a set of $500/night rooms in Gotham City or scrambling to find a squad of large, luggage-ready rental cars and enough drivers willing to launch a five-hour (traffic-willing) trek to the DC area.

But now there’s another way. Thanks to the 2004 opening of a rail link, JFK has easy access to Amtrak. For $8.50 per person and about 30 minutes of our time, the combination of the “AirTrain” and the Long Island Railroad took our voluminous group of cousins, in-laws, and tired children to Manhattan’s Penn Station. And that gave us myriad options to ride Amtrak back to the D.C. area. While we chose the high-speed Acela, which was pretty peppy, the point of this story is transportation redundancy. America needs a transportation system in which the pieces fit together.

Planners call this inter-modal transportation, and it’s something that can allow people in small towns like Charlottesville to seamlessly make their way— typically via rail— to the better long-distance options found in bigger cities. Unfortunately, the promise of an inter-modal system has not been met by reality in this country.

Though Thurgood Marshall (BWI) comes close.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Let’s go back to JFK for a moment. It’s a little pathetic that there’s no single-seat subway line between Manhattan and New York’s busiest airport, but it could be worse: there’s no subway connection at all to New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

And— if I may continue the digression— it’s pretty well known why the airport now known as JFK opened without any rail access in 1959. Back then, New York transportation policy was in the hands of a savvy but non-visionary planner named Robert Moses. As detailed in Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, The Power Broker, Moses steered the densely populated New York metropolis away from public transportation in the direction of highways. As history would show, toll roads could serve as short-term cash cows, but at JFK, roads can be an insulting waste of time to many of the 125,000 passengers and 35,000 airport employees who might like to leave a car at home.

I love CHO, the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport, but in the past few months, I’ve been trying to use rail to reach some of the bigger airports with their cheaper fares and better array of flights, particularly non-stops. Here’s what I’ve found.

Dulles. A very sexy-looking terminal designed by the dude who gave us the iconic TWA terminal at JFK. But like JFK, this is another giant airport thrown open to the public without a shred of rail service, and getting there from Charlottesville takes longer every year. Traffic lights bloom like mushrooms along U.S. 29, and Northern Virginians clog I-66 and the access road. So what was once a dependable hour and 45 minutes from downtown now takes two and half hours on a good day. And don’t forget to allow at least 20 minutes to negotiate a trip to the terminal from IAD’s Siberia-like “satellite parking.” Alas, even when Dulles finally gets rail access, it’ll come via the under-construction Metro Silver Line. Fine for Washingtonians when it opens in 2016, but even then it won’t bring Charlottesvillians much closer to Dulles.

National. Not much better than Dulles when driving. However, DCA does have rail access, and I was able to use a piece of that recently. After driving an hour and half to Springfield, I thought about parking in the Metro garage, but they allocate only 17 spaces to overnight parking and decline to publish the price online. So I did what any reasonable traveler would do and parked on the street by the Springfield Crossing apartment complex. While my strategy did require a quarter-mile walk to the Metro station, I got 10 days of free parking while I explored Costa Rica. And the four-station ride along Metro’s Blue Line ($5.25 round-trip) put me right at the front door of Ronald Reagan’s airport.

BWI. In a huge rarity, the airport now named for Thurgood Marshall not only offers easy access to Maryland commuter rail but has its own on-property Amtrak station. In January, BWI gave me a huge boost for a ski trip to Utah. BWI offered an affordable direct flight to Salt Lake City for about a third of the price of CHO’s non-direct ticket. Luckily, the flight just happened to take off shortly after Charlottesville’s new train service pulled into the BWI train station. And because I came from the Hook office downtown, I was able to walk half a mile to the Charlottesville Amtrak station with no cab fare or parking fees. Even after paying Amtrak, my travel price was less than half the CHO ticket.

Richmond. With its huge crop of JetBlue and AirTran departures, RIC has become one of the hottest airports in the region for low fares. And with the rarely-crowded I-64 as its access point, it’s a dependable hour and 20 minutes from Charlottesville with parking lots snugly nestled around the compact terminal. However, there’s a major irony here. The old C&O mainline (now CSX/Buckingham Branch) that runs through Charlottesville actually runs right onto the RIC property, so this airport is physically rail-linked to our town. Alas, only freight trains currently ply the route, and there’s no plan to launch a passenger service.

CHO. The Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport has considerable charms. It’s a tiny terminal, it’s never more than 20 minutes from anywhere in Charlottesville, and you can get away with arriving just 30 minutes before your flight. (There once was a time when you could arrive 15, 10, or even five minutes before the flight, but Delta no longer allows such skin-of-the-teethery.)

Yesterday, July 29, I found a $245 ticket for a non-stop jet from Charlottesville to Atlanta around Labor Day. Although it was $100 more than a flight out of Richmond, CHO is really close and really friendly, and if it had rail access, well, that would be a travel trifecta. And if the fare had stayed online for more than a few hours after I saw it, I would have actually booked it.