If the Olympic rings were indeed to come to Illinois, the long-simmering solutions to Chicago-area freight congestion might just look to Beijing to achieve the "Chinese" pace they need to come to fruition.
   Some measures are already in process: CN and BNSF, for instance, have reached agreement on sharing trackage rights and operational duties in the region, in order to improve fluidity. And organizations like Business Leaders for Transportation and the Metropolitan Planning Council continue to work toward freight and commuter solutions. The recently passed federal Safe Accountable Flexible Efficient Transportation Equity Act allotted only 10 percent of the funds needed for the multifaceted $1.5-billion Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program (CREATE), which seeks a combination of road and rail overpasses and underpasses, among other improvements.

The $6.6-billion O'Hare Modernization Program recently received $300 million in federal discretionary funds that will help the busy facility reconfigure from an obsolete intersecting runway system to one that features a parallel runway configuration.

   At a meeting of the Metropolitan Planning Council in fall 2005, William Spurr, North American president for Bombardier Transportation, discussed how public-private partnerships have worked in London and in Seoul, and could work in U.S. cities like Chicago as a way to bypass the inevitable project funding shortfalls at the federal, regional and state levels. The public-private pitch was seconded in February 2006 by Business Leaders for Transportation.
   "Public-Private Partnerships can help deliver quality multi-modal transportation infrastructure statewide, while minimizing the state's need to raise additional public revenue or take on hefty new debt," said John S. Gates, Jr., chair of Business Leaders' Public-Private Partnerships Committee, and immediate past chair of the Metropolitan Planning Council. "We recommend state leaders adopt legislation this session to enable Partnerships to play a strong role in transportation investments in Illinois."
   Held up as Exhibit "A" for such an approach was the widely supported Elgin-O'Hare Extension/O'Hare Bypass, which would both improve freight movement and support business development near O'Hare.
   "Though the Elgin-O'Hare Extension/O'Hare Bypass has been on the region's wish list for many years, Illinois has been unable to afford to build it using public money or current tolls — and we're unlikely to be able to afford it in the future without the use of a Public-Private Partnership," said Thomas H. Morsch, Jr., former director of the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority and co-chair of the Metropolitan Planning Council's Transportation Committee. "Our study indicates that the project has the potential to generate an estimated $905 million in private equity, freeing up limited state resources that could be used as a match for other planned improvements in Illinois."
   But the biggest breakthrough is the $300 million in federal discretionary funds that U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta granted for the financing of the $6.6-billion O'Hare Modernization Program, which calls for reconfiguring O'Hare's outdated intersecting runway system into a modern, parallel runway configuration.
   "The Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation and 14 other state and federal agencies have now approved every facet of the O'Hare Modernization Program," Mayor Richard M. Daley said at an airport ceremony in November 2005.