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Source: City Hall close on $8.5 billion O'Hare expansion deal
Chicago is on the verge of striking a historic $8.5 billion deal with airline carriers at O'Hare to give the airport its largest-ever terminal expansion, adding dozens of gates and 3 million square feet to its footprint. Central to the plan to modernize and grow the airport is the construction of a new Global Terminal, which would replace Terminal 2 and serve larger aircraft for international flights, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.
[...] The expansion would be complete by 2026, and the work could potentially create tens of thousands of jobs over the next eight years, the source said. It could also give O'Hare a chance to rise above its routinely dismal ranking for on-time flights.
[...] [The] mayor has said he could deliver on the long-elusive dream of a high-speed rail line between downtown and O'Hare. Four powerhouse firms, including Elon Musk's The Boring Company, have shown interest in designing, building, financing, operating and maintaining an express train.The city is hoping for a travel time of 20 minutes or less, with express trains running every 15 minutes for most of the day at fares cheaper than a taxi or Uber ride.
Also at the Chicago Tribune.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday February 27 2018, @11:57AM (2 children)
It seems to me that it would make more sense to add capacity at Midway Airport on the South Side. They have the land and it's connected to the L already. It's a shorter trip from downtown, too.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday February 27 2018, @12:19PM (1 child)
O'Hare does about 420,000 flights per year, Midway does about 80,000. (I work for a company that among other things tracks airline schedules.) If you're just flying into Chicago or out of Chicago, O'Hare and Midway are equivalent and it doesn't matter which one becomes larger.
But if you're connecting through Chicago to another destination, naturally O'Hare gives you far more options both in terms of available destinations and in terms of convenient connection times. That is, if you land in Midway there might be flights that continue on to your desired destination but that leave in 30 minutes, so any delay to your flight to Midway ruins the connection. Or in Midway there might be flights to your desired destination that leave in 6 hours, so it gets you there but it's undesirable. Or simply Midway may have no flights to the place you want. In O'Hare there are five times as many flights, so there's a much better chance the connecting flights to your target destination are available in a convenience one to two hours from your scheduled landing. So from the perspective of maximizing available connections, it's far better to have one colossal airport than any number of smaller nearby airports, even if the pairs or triplets of airports add up to more total capacity than the big airport.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday February 27 2018, @12:23PM
I just looked it up, O'Hare has flights to over 225 destinations though some only have one flight every few months. Midway only flies to about 90 destinations.