Latest O’Hare Express Rail’s Big Advantage? It Actually Makes Sense

The O’Hare Flyer deserves a good look...

Chicago has been trying for decades to answer one of the great questions of urban transportation: How do you get from O’Hare to downtown without spending the better part of an hour watching your arrival time creep steadily later on the Kennedy Expressway?

There is, of course, the CTA Blue Line. It works. I use it. A lot. But as I told Crain’s Chicago Business, it is also something of a milk run — more than a dozen stops and roughly 45 minutes between the airport and downtown, assuming everything goes according to plan. Add luggage in the narrow aisles and a tired traveler or two, and the romance of urban transit can wear thin pretty quickly.

Image courtesy O’Hare Flyer

Enter the O’Hare Flyer.

Unveiled publicly this week, the proposal would connect O’Hare’s Terminal 2 with Chicago’s Old Main Post Office in about 15 minutes, with trains leaving every 15 minutes for most of the day. The project team expects fares to come in at a premium to CTA, but below the typical cost of a taxi or rideshare.

And no, the plan does not involve drilling a futuristic tunnel beneath Chicago. That may be the cleverest thing about it.

Image: CBS Chicago, circa 2018. ‘nuff said.

The team behind the Flyer — including former Amtrak planner Mark Walbrun, transportation executive Kristi Lafleur and Chicago public-affairs veteran Dave Lundy — noticed that years of changes in freight-rail operations had left pieces of existing railroad right-of-way available between downtown and O’Hare. Combine those corridors with some new track, flyovers, and about 1.5 miles of elevated construction at the airport, add modern battery-electric trains, and suddenly the seemingly impossible starts looking surprisingly practical.

The estimated price tag is $2.25 billion, which the project’s sponsors intend to finance privately. If they can pull it off, service could begin in about five years.

Now yes, that is a BIG if, of course. Railroad agreements still have to be completed. The city has to be onboard. Federal regulators will have a say. And private investors still have to write some very large checks.

But at the same time, this isn’t a cocktail-napkin transportation scheme or a railfan fever dream. Lord knows we have enough of those already. This team has spent three years doing engineering and ridership work, talking with railroads, regulators and investors and trying to solve the details before stepping into the spotlight.

And the potential payoff is enormous.

Hong Kong has its Airport Express. London has Heathrow Express. Tokyo, Stockholm and other major world cities have made fast airport-to-city-center rail part of their basic transportation infrastructure. No American city yet offers quite the same thing. Chicago could be first.

That matters for more than travelers trying to make dinner after landing at O’Hare. A fast, dependable connection between one of the world’s great airports and the heart of one of America’s great cities is economic infrastructure: useful for conventions, tourism, business investment and the thousands of ordinary trips Chicagoans and visitors make every day.

I had the opportunity to learn about the O’Hare Flyer before the project became public, and I came away genuinely excited by what the team had put together. As I told Crain’s, this is about as close to a slam-dunk as rail infrastructure projects tend to get.

Now comes the hard part: keeping everybody onboard long enough to build it.

But after decades of proposals, studies, abandoned stations and assorted visions of tunneling beneath Chicago, it looks like the answer was sitting there all along. Sometimes the smartest new railroad is the railroad somebody finally noticed.