[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by OrdoSeclorum

I disagree. It's true, more is more. If the choice was between getting a free airport in Peotone or getting nothing, better to have the third airport. But one airport with capacity X is worth more than twice as much as two airports with capacity 0.5x. There are network effects to scale and advantages related to connectivity. It's the same reason the revenue from Google search is worth more than 9x Bing search.

For the most part, the people who want an new airport 50 miles from downtown is that they want resources and infrastructure to be spent and built there rather than downtown. And it's a token voting issue for the rest of the state. "I live in Bloomington. If I can fly to Rome by driving 50 miles south of Chicago instead of driving TO Chicago, that would be great!"

Roads, transit, major infrastructure like airports, these should be built in a way that they leverage nearby resources, not diffusing them. Buffalo, for example, has the same population it did in 1950, but it's spread out to 3x the area. It's more costly to maintain that sprawl, there's less benefit to living there and it's more difficult to share amenities, so the people are less prosperous than they could be.

O'hare is a tremendous asset for the region and state. Building an international airport that draws business away from it damages it's value as a connecting hub. And we would lose leverage over the carriers that fly there. No thank you.

It would probably be more cost effective to just better connect O'Hare to the Illinois Amtrak network. Schiphol Airport effectively serves the entire Netherlands due to frequent train connections to everywhere in the country.