[ardecila]

No, not a rumor at all, just a possible and likely scenario. Daley's always been pissed that Atlanta stole the top spot from Chicago, so now we have a multi-billion dollar program that - surprise - reconfigures the airfield to look like Atlanta's. There are very good practical reasons for the parallel-runway system in high-traffic airports, and Chicago is the busiest airport that DOESN'T have a parallel configuration. To be honest, it's probably not even Daley - but somebody in the planning process wanted both the efficiency of Atlanta's runway layout and the simple logic of their terminal layout, even though it doesn't really work with our current terminal layout. (The inspiration could also have come from Denver, which has a similar layout to Atlanta)

I checked the O'Hare planning documents - the underground APM will indeed be a secure system, which makes absolutely NO sense unless they can also transport baggage from east to west in a timely fashion. Fortunately, they're closing 32L-14R, so there won't be any runways separating the east terminals from the west. Theoretically, you could just run baggage carts across, but it's a long way.