[Rail Claimore]

This expansion of O'hare is necessary, while at the same time, not ideal. Basically, what O'hare is doing is maximizing the potential capacity in its immediate surrounding area by buying up all the land between the Northwest Tollway, Tri-state, and two major railraod corridors. The only way O'hare can expand capacity in the long term after this is through using bigger planes, something most US airports don't do compared to those in Europe and Asia. Heathrow and Haneda are able to handle passenger volumes that rival O'hare on only two parallel runways because mostly jumbo jets land at those two airports.

Atlanta is a good model to follow for O'hare, but there's another key difference between the two: Hartsfield-Jackson is surrounded almost exclusively by industry and distribution warehouses, in addition to poor communities who don't easily put up fights in court over proposed expansions. Atlanta is building a 5th runway right now so it can do simultaneous landings for 3 commercial aircraft at once.

O'hare will be able to do that after this expansion as well, but given the placement of terminals that are being built with its expansion, taxi times will increase as planes have to taxi a mile and cross up to three other runways just to reach the terminal complex. O'hare could mitigate this problem by maximizing the use of cargo aircraft on the outer-most runways and passenger aircraft using the runways adjacent to the terminals. Atlanta will not have to worry about this as much since its South Terminal complex is being built between the current southern-most operational runway and the one under construction now.

After this adventure, O'hare is done when it comes to major capital expansion projects. This will probably increase O'hare's passenger load to a maximum of 100 million unless bigger planes start being used or new ATC technology leads to increased capacity, both of which are feasible possibilities.

If Chicago is to build another airport, the logical choice would be Gary. However, if they want to build Gary to anything near what O'hare is, they will be required to take a LOT of land around the area and move a bunch of infrastructure. It would also require a totally new runway layout as well that would not interfere with O'hare. Midway's layout will screw up any new airport unless Midway itself is torn down. The Peotone idea does have its merits in that an airport the size of DFW could be built there, but the negatives far outweigh the positives of any airport being built there.