Thinking long-term on I-490

Most motorists living west of O’Hare International Airport can be forgiven if they aren’t yet exactly leaping with enthusiasm for the extensive roadway expansion under way there.

Unless they work at the airport, the $340 million link at the end of Route 390 won’t offer them much. The interchange being built, and scheduled to be complete in three years, won’t be of use to them. It will connect only to a parking lot for personnel who work at O’Hare, a factor that may have gotten lost for people who’ve been hearing about the coming advantages of “western access” and the I-490 extension.

To that extent, the project clearly demands some broader long-term thinking. Practically from the beginning of the project decades ago, leaders of the city of Chicago — which is home to the airport and largely controls the O’Hare Modernization Program — have considered the current element to be little more than a grandiose employee parking lot whose greatest traffic impact will be the limited congestion it will ease for users of the airport coming from the east or the direction of the city.

Considerably less consideration has been given to airport passengers coming from Hoffman Estates, Schaumburg and dozens of other suburban and exurban points to the west, though access points to the Tri-State and Jane Addams tollways are expected to offer distinct benefits to western suburbs.

In an interview with our In Transit columnist Marni Pyke, Kevin Bargnes, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Aviation, reaffirmed that the completed beltline offers the potentional for “vastly improved connectivity to O’Hare’s north, south and western boundaries” and said the project includes “site preparation work on airport property for future development.”

But he emphasized that this “site preparation work” is the extent of the planning so far.

“[T]he scope, phasing, and funding for development along O'Hare's western boundary remains a matter of active discussion with the airport's many partners and stakeholders, including the airlines and local community leaders,” he said.

Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Schaumburg Democrat, is among those stakeholders — both as a political representative taking part in planning the route’s future and as a personal user. He pointed out the key limitations of the current effort.

“For me to get to O’Hare, I need to go into the city and come back west. I have to go east to come back west,” he said. “That makes no sense.”

That is no doubt true for tens of thousands of O’Hare users. Krishnamoorthi, who supports a vast expansion of O’Hare with a western terminal and baggage handling operation, and Bargnes emphasize that all these matters are under consideration and feature a wide range of thorny issues. As various sources have shown over the years, these include likely huge cost as well as diverse interests ranging from the airlines, which have strongly opposed the idea of a western terminal, to the city, which sees less benefit from it, and various suburbs, many of which enthusiastically welcome the economic development prospects.

These are not insignificant matters, to be sure. The costs and a means of generating the revenues have to be determined. The many stakeholders obviously have differences to work out.

But the long-term value of the project is not insignificant, either.

Western access to O’Hare offers the prospects of easier access and less congestion at the airport as well as vast business and development opportunities. Krishnamoorthi said stakeholders here are trying “to get a better sense of timing and how (city officials) see their vision unfolding for this area.”

That is an answer Mayor Brandon Johnson, who as an Elgin native ought to be intimately familiar with the issues and opportunities west of O’Hare, and other project leaders should waste no time providing.