Does anyone have a suggestion on the best way to get from BWI airport to Manassas, VA?
What day of the week/ time of day?
The other question besides day/time is how quickly do you need to get to Manassas, and how much are you willing to pay for that to happen?
Landing at BWI in a limited weekday time window (between around noon-5 pm) yields the only reasonable economical solution: take the MARC commuter train to Union Station in Washington ($7), then a Virginia Railway Express train to Manassas ($9.80) where--if you don't have anyone to pick you up--you can taxi/rideshare to your final destination. The last VRE train out to Manassas is at 6:50 p.m., and to make that you'd want to catch nothing later than the 5:45 train from BWI to Union Station.
https://www.mta.maryland.gov/schedule/11079
https://www.vre.org/vre/assets/File/pdfs/Manassas_Line_Schedule_Effective_2015NOV30.pdf
Pretty much any other day/time, your only realistic options are:
1) See if you can reasonably and economically change your flight to Dulles (IAD)--will leave you with a much shorter direct transportation need to your final destination.
2) Direct transportation from BWI to your final destination (taxi, rideshare, car service). I'd think you're easily looking at $200 in a taxi if the driver will even accept it, maybe a bit less in rideshare, a bit more with a car service.
3) Rent a car and drive it yourself. You can probably return it to Dulles with little or no one-way dropoff charge.
Direct transportation will likely be faster than the two-train option 99% of the time.
Edited: 5 years agoI should add that there are also a few Amtrak trains running from Union Station to Manassas that run on the weekends that you could substitute for the weekday VRE trains. But those schedules (and MARC's) are so limited that it's a safe bet that there will be a fair amount of waiting time at one or both stages of your trip.
Amtrak also provides more frequent weekend service from BWI to Union Station, but at a higher cost than MARC's.
Tuesday, 7:30 am
Thanks for the input. I was trying to avoid inconveniencing the folks I'm visiting by asking to be picked up. Not an option to change to IAD at this point.
Rent a car: it's a 60 mile trip. Or take the MARC train to DC, then the Metro Red line to Metro Center, and the Metro Orange Line to Vienna. Then they only have to drive 15 miles.
Edited: 5 years agoIf you are from SoCal, it's like saying, I'm landing in Long Beach, how can I get easily to Oxnard?