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Rob Pegoraro @[email protected] · 2026-07-31 · 23:40 UTC

Dulles Airport does need a reboot, but the two dumbest parts of its $22.5 billion redesign need to get the boot first

For decades, it was screamingly obvious that Washington Dulles International Airport desperately needed three upgrades: extending Metro to there, replacing its horribly cramped C/D concourse, and retiring the giant, wheeled Mobile Lounges and Plane Mates that haul passengers around my city’s international airport.

We got the first thing done in 2022, and now Wednesday’s announcement of a $22.5 billion transformation of the airport puts the second two objectives in the measurable future.

For the most part, the new plan seems good. A new series of concourses, starting with the already-under-construction E concourse, would replace the 1985-vintage, window-deprived C/D facility that United Airlines regulars rightfully despise. And an expanded Aerotrain network would end the need to take those people movers–often crowded, always reeking slightly of diesel fuel–to or from the D concourse and from arriving international flights to IAD’s International Arrivals Building.

But two of the components of this new concept aren’t in the Master Plan that MWAA approved last year and instead seem to reflect the input of somebody who may have last flown commercial out of Dulles in the previous millennium: President Trump.

The more immediately offensive idea, seen in three of the “conceptual renderings” on MWAA’s site, would plop a blob of glass and concrete atop the iconic, Eero Saarinen-designed Main Terminal–a triumph of Brutalist architecture and one of Saarinen’s finest works anywhere.

In addition to being ugly and enormously expensive to build, that addition would add capacity where Dulles doesn’t need it most. Although check-in desks at the Main Terminal can get crowded around major holidays, that building usually serves as an efficient funnel to the security checkpoints.

And should we ever need to expand the terminal, we already know how do that without doing violence to Saarinen’s masterpiece–by building extensions of the original structure as MWAA did in 1996.

The less obvious dumb idea in the new plan isn’t mentioned in the announcements from the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and IAD’s dominant carrier United Airlines but did get a plug from Trump during an Oval Office unveiling of the plan: adding a 32,000-space parking garage.

That would be almost 50 percent more than IAD’s current parking capacity: 4,508 and 3,727 spaces in the two daily garages, plus 1,852 in the terminal lot (and an unspecified number of valet spots) and 11,431 in the economy lots that require a bus ride to the terminal.

What Trump bragged would the largest parking garage in the world would also be extravagantly expensive to build. A study released in February by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies cited a $29,000 per-space construction cost for aboveground parking in the D.C. market, so that adds up to $928 million before any premium for building next to an active airport.

That exercise in auto-addled thinking needs to go in the same circular file as the plan’s disfiguration of the Main Terminal.

Cost grounds alone should see to that: Even if United writes a very large check to MWAA, the airports authority would still be floating billions of dollars in bonds, with interest costs that passengers would wind up paying. The smaller the total price tag, the smaller the rise in the cost per enplanement (CPE) that winds up in the price of every ticket. MWAA projects a $12.77 CPE for this year, but that figure could exceed $90 under this scheme and place IAD in the same stratospheric altitude as JFK.

I am somewhat confident that these bottom-line considerations will lead MWAA and UA, who will have to deal with this project long after Trump leaves office, to do the right thing. That may be foolish optimism on my part, but I’ve already seen sanity prevail in one other way here: This week’s discussions about the future of Dulles have not featured any suggestions that we make the place yet another thing renamed for Trump.

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