State Transportation and Toll Road officials are discussing how to finish building the Elgin-O’Hare Expressway to Nowhere so that it connects with the airport and nearby toll roads, according to the Daily Herald.

This I gotta see.

Where to put the confounded highway and how to pay for it have held it up for decades, leading to the well-worn quote about how the Elgin-O’Hare Expressway goes neither to O’Hare or Elgin.

Currently, the eastern leg ends in Itasca, about five miles short of the airport, and feeds into such congested arterials as Thorndale Ave. and York Rd. The present terminus would be moved to the east to connect with a new airport by-pass road that supposedly will be built on the airport itself. That by-pass road would connect somewhere with the Tri-State Tollway on the south and the Northwest Tollway on the north.

I cannot imagine a more financially and logistically challenged highway project.

This isn’t simply a matter of cutting an expressway through cornfields. Substantial obstacles stand in the way: railroad tracks, the Bensenville rail yards, warehouses, public facilities, houses—depending on the final route selected. IDOT documents only hint at the difficulties. Here’s just one of many paragraphs describing the obstacles:

Major existing and proposed air and freight rail transportation facilities constrain location and design options for roadway improvements in this [south by-pass] segment. The area in the vicinity of the Elgin O’Hare Extension system interchange is in a floodplain. The proposed system interchange near O’Hare Airport will require placement of new embankment and tunneling through the floodplain, requiring mitigation and complicated structural elements. Furthermore, the existing and proposed O’Hare airfield layout and associated runway and airspace constraints further control roadway design characteristics.

In other words, the Federal Aviation Administration will have a hand in the design; you can’t have planes running into cars, after all. Just getting through the environmental impact statement process will be a long, drawn-out process, if not a nightmare.

I’m just getting started.

The by-pass road’s interchanges with the Northwest and Tri-State toll roads will be massive projects, not just in requiring condemnation of nearby suburban land, but in cost. Considering the requirements of modern interstate highway design, the interchanges will involved fly-overs and –unders; long and high-speed merge lanes, provisions for rapid transit or rail lines and a long-list of other costly features.

The highways will intersect with numerous local arterials, either consuming private property or infringing on airport operations. In some places the by-pass road will have to be buried to meet airport operational needs. The Elgin-O’Hare expressway extension will end at a planned western airport terminal, a facility, by the way, that the major airlines don’t want and won’t pay for.

IDOT officials have promised Elk Grove Village Mayor Craig Johnson that the new highways won’t take land from the community’s major industrial park, meaning that for largest stretches the by-pass road will have to be located on airport property. How exactly that will be done isn’t explained, but one can assume that the roads will have to be cut under runways, taxiways or “crash zones” at the ends of runways. If you want to get an idea of the kind of project this would be, check out the massive highway configurations that were necessary to burrow a by-pass road (I-285) under parts of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

The costs? No federal or state money is in sight, so it will have to come from tolls. That’s right, another toll road in Chicago. I’m not necessarily opposed to toll roads because it imposes direct costs on the users. Except that the users will pay for all the other expensive requirements, such as relocation costs, environmental remediation and bus/rail transit rights-of-way. How much more debt can the toll authority realistically take on after almost completing its massive reconstruction project?

As always, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s airport minions will insist, “No problem, trust us.”

I can’t wait to see the detailed engineering maps of how all this is supposed to get done. Some readers may remember the long fight over Mayor Richard J. Daley’s dream of a Crosstown Expressway that would have cut a large swath through the West and South sides. The project finally died of its own technical, cost and political weight. But it wasn’t until those detailed drawings became available (I remember unrolling a 20-foot roll of them on the floor of an IDOT office) that it became obvious that it was just physically impossible.

For now, it is important for suburbanites and others to believe that the highways can be built, because it became a quid pro quo for ending their opposition to the airport expansion. It’s not crazy to suggest that by the time that preliminary highway work and the airport expansion is close to done that we’ll discover—surprise!—that the Elgin-O’Hare extension and the by-pass roads are discovered to by unfeasible—cost-wise, environmentally and design-wise. Then DuPage County Board Chairman Bob Schillerstrom and other suburban officials who dropped their opposition to the expansion in return for the highway improvements will be left holding the bag.

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Dennis Byrne is a regular correspondent for the Chicago Daily Observer.  Mr. Byrne has worked as a consultant on transportation issues at O’Hare.