Madison to Ohare Travel (Milwaukee: transfer, costs, bus)

[desties]

Just curious if anyone knows what the worse times for travel are from Madisont o Ohare. Our flight leave at 11am. We want to try and be there by 9am, so what time should we leave madison?


Thanks!

John

[Drover]

No later than 5:30am. 8-9am is about the worst conceivable time to be fighting traffic in the O'Hare area. You should be fine from Madison right up to about 10 miles from the airport. After that, it's a total crapshoot. There's a chance you'll zoom right to the parking lot, and there's a chance that last 10 miles will take you 45 minutes. Good luck.

[LML]

Just curious. Why aren't you flying out of Madison? A few years ago I discovered that the little bit more it costs to fly out of Madison is more than made up for by not having the hassle of the trip to O'Hare. If not Madison, then flying out of Milwaukee is a lot easier than out of O'Hare. But honestly, I love being able to just drive over to the Madison airport, park, get on the plane and go. Often have to transfer, depending on the destination, but even so it is a lot easier than the trip to O'Hare.

[Chelito23]

With no traffic, Madison to Chicago is 2 and a half hours. Arriving at rush hour is a tough call. I would leave at 6AM, but I think most people would leave earlier "just to be on the safe side."

A lot of people prefer to fly out of Chicago because it is cheaper, it is an easy drive and many times a flight to OHare from MSN can be cancelled or delayed thus making passengers miss connections. It has happened to my parents several times. They have ended up driving to OHare when their connecting flight was cancelled out of MSN. I know most people prefer to pay more for the convenience though, but I think the other reasons are justifiable...mainly because of how the US air travel "spoke" system works.

[GreggB]

Personally--if it were me--I would leave Madison NO later than 5A.M. Any significant accident could tie up in-bound traffic big time. As a Former truck driver going into Chicago frequently, I can recall times when that would happen and one would only travel only 5 - 10 miles in an hour. If the accident was big enough (Tanker fire or something of that nature), traffic could be re-routed onto surface streets, and than it's really a nightmare. When traveling into Chicago my motto was EXPECT the Worst, and HOPE for the best. Seriously, leave early and you should arrive relaxed and on time!!

[toast12]

If you have to take the trek from Mad Town to O'Hare I would suggest taking the van galder/coach usa bus

[br7or13]

toast12 is right-o; avoid the B.S. of air travel and get to O'hare in maybe 2ish hours, and it's way cheap!!!

[Bo]

Originally Posted by toast12

If you have to take the trek from Mad Town to O'Hare I would suggest taking the van galder/coach usa bus

My family and I used to do that, too. Parking at O'Hare is so expensive! If you're staying at your destination for any length of time, it's cheaper to take the bus.

BTW, I know this is an old thread, but it's timely because this is a time of year when many people are traveling by air.

[7G9C4J2]

Good point, Bowie. And I completely agree about Van Galder; can't count the number of times I've been stranded because the O'Hare-to-Madison flight got canceled. I just gave up even trying. If I have to go through O'Hare, I use Van Galder.

That said, for most destinations, we have found that flying out of Milwaukee's airport is either as cheap or cheaper than flights originating from O'Hare, and both the traffic and the travel time from Madison to Milwaukee is much, much easier than dealing with Chicago toll roads and traffic jams. When folks visit here from elsewhere in the country, we always encourage them to fly into and out of Milwaukee.

[country pride]

Ive flown to and from Ohare a couple of times, and the driving commute to/from there to Madison wasnt as bad as it might be now. Most of the drives were around the midday hour, and we only ran into a few areas where it bottlenecked....but those were areas where there were accidents.