Getting to Milwaukee

In My Humble Opinion
1

I may have an interview in Milwaukee in the near future. I would be coming from Portland, OR. I was looking at flights online, just to get an idea of the cost, and found that there are no direct flights. Most of them have a layover at O’Hare.

Now, I’ve never been anywhere near either Chicago or Milwaukee, but I immediately thought “WTF? Aren’t these cities, like, really close together?” I looked it up, and sure enough, O’Hare to Downtown Milwaukee is 80 miles.

The lowest-cost flight I saw had a three-hour layover. Why the hell would I do that? I could rent a car, drive to my hotel, and be settled in eating dinner and watching TV before the second flight even left the ground! Or so I’d like to think.

So, I have two questions here. The first being: why would anyone fly from Chicago to Milwaukee? For that matter, why do such flights even exist, for such a short distance? I know, I know, the obvious answer is not everyone drives. But in that case, surely it would be cheaper, quicker, and less of a hassle to take a bus or a train! When I say quicker, I’m taking the whole airport experience into account: arriving early, dealing with the anal probe at security, boarding the plane, waiting around in the plane as it sits there for no apparent reason before taking off, and again after it lands, etc, etc.

(Perhaps you can tell, I’m not a fan of flying.)

My second question, regarding renting a car and driving the remaining way: let’s say I arrive at O’Hare at 4:00 or 5:00. How bad is traffic around there? Would I be better off going with the layover? I find that hard to imagine, but it’s worth asking.

2

I have driven from Milwaukee to O’Hare, and I would only recommend it if you do it at true off-peak hours (say between 10-11:30 a.m. 1-2:30 p.m. or after about 8 p.m.), particularly if you’ve never experienced driving on the Tri-State and I-94.

There’s bus service from O’Hare to downtown Milwaukee. It runs every hour throughout daytime, costs $26 and is scheduled to take 2:10.

3

If you left O’hare at a non-rush hour time it’s a very easy* 90 minute drive, if you leave at a time when you’ll hit a rush hour, tack on at least a half hour depending on exactly where you are going in Milwaukee…where are you going in Milwaukee? I ask because the afternoon rush hour really hits us hard from the Marquette Interchange and north so if you’ll be south of that it’ll be much less of an issue.

*It’s a really easy drive once you get on the freeway, for some reason about half the time I leave O’hare I get on in the wrong direction and have to turn around, luckily it’s only once a year or so.
ETA, if you can you might want to time your flight so you can be on the road at a time that isn’t 4:00-5:00pm, Chicago’s rush hour isn’t very much fun either.

4

Midwest Airlines has a flight from Portland to Milwaukee through Denver - I would opt for that instead

5

driving O’Hare to Milwaukee isn’t too bad.

Still - if you try it during rush hours you may lose the benefit of flight time. I doubt you’d do worse, though.

6

Not sure of the connections to Denver but another option, depending on your destination in Milwaukee, would be to fly into Madison, Wisconsin (there are 3 or 4 daily flights from Denver to Madison on United). It’s about a one hour drive to Downtown Milwaukee and there really isn’t much of a rush hour in Madison and you will going against traffic during afternoon rush hour in Milwaukee.

FWIW and IMHO I’d stay in Portland!

7

There’s a bus from Chicago O’Hare to Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field. There you can catch pulbic transport or another bus in to downtown

I’ve taken it before it’s nice: Wisconsin Coach Lines

8

It’s only a ten minute drive, I don’t see what the big deal is.

9

I have no idea. The interview is only a possibility at this point, for a program I applied to. I was just trying to get a feel for what the trip would cost me.

I don’t even need to mouse over that link to guess what it is. Har har. :stuck_out_tongue:

10

There’s a commuter train from Chicago to Milwaukee. I’ve not taken it myself, but know people who have, and they say it’s great.

11

I live S of OHare, and used to drive to Miwaukee a couple of times a month for work. A very pleasant drive - and there are alternative routes to avoid some of the most common jam-up spots.

I cannot imagine why anyone would fly from Milw to OHare, unless to hook up with a flight out of OHare. If an option exists to avoid Ohare and instead fly into Milw from another airport as someone suggested, I would consider that.

Are you going to need to rent a car in Milw anyway to get to your interview? If so, and if it is cheaper to fly directly into Ohare, I’d suggest renting a car there and driving up to Milw.

The rush hours on either end are not a big deal - so long as you don’t run into horrendous weather or something. It will slow you down, but won’t add much more than 30 minutes onto a 90 minute drive. So just relax, listen to some tunes, and don’t drive yourself crazy over the fact that you aren’t making good time.

12

Be different! Fly to Muskegon, MI and take the ferry across Lake Michigan.

13

In the past I found it cheaper to fly from MKE to ORD to Palm Springs (PSP) than to drive to ORD and catch the exact same flight from ORD to PSP. $200 cheaper.

In the past, I’ve also flown First Class from MKE to ORD. There wasn’t enough time for drink service, or even a bag of nuts, but when we ended up spending more time taxiing on the ground at ORD than we spent in the air, I guess it was nice to have more comfortable seats.

14

Huh, I did a sample search and found it tough to find flights through Chicago. Are you limiting yourself to a certain airline, United maybe?

The cheapest (<$250) flights I found for midweek sample dates were on Delta and Midwest and take you through MSP. There were also flights on Frontier through Denver, and even some of the ones on United will take you through Denver instead of Chicago. US Air has flights through Phoenix and Continental is through Houston. Flights on Southwest don’t stop in Chicago either.

15

80 miles is 80 miles. If you can find a flight that dovetails neatly, it can be worth it, and a connecting flight through ORD can be cheaper than a direct flight to ORD followed by a drive, train ride, or bus ride to Milwaukee.

There’s also the benefit of being transported versus doing the driving. If you’ve just been on a three or four hour flight, do you really want to have to drive for another couple (few, several, many) hours, through what may be (and in your case, during rush hour, *will *be) excruciatingly gridlocked traffic?

Most people flying ORD-MKE aren’t doing just that leg–it’s part of a connecting flight. So they’ve already paid most of the time “cost” of flying versus another method of transportation. Then, it’s just an issue of how long the layover is.

I love that train. I don’t drive, and it’s awesome when I want to visit friends in Chicago (or as the first leg of a trip to visit my dad, who now lives in Champaign-Urbana).

For a single person, IIRC and unless prices have changed, the ferry is *more *expensive than just flying Milwaukee to Grand Rapids. It also takes way longer. (MKE to GRR was quite possibly the shortest single-leg flight I’ve ever been on–I think it was like 20 minutes from takeoff to wheels down.)

16

My mom goes to see relatives in northern Wisconsin very often, so she has to deal with a similar situation in Minneapolis. Her normal route is the fly to Minneapolis and then take a connecting puddle jumper 90 miles (so maybe 30 min?) to the regional airport in Wisconsin. I always ask her why she doesn’t just fly to MSP and have someone get her, or rent a car, she says no one can take time off work and she doesn’t want to deal with a rental. Then I found her a taxi company that does the exact same trip for $30, airport to airport, and she said she didn’t want to hassle of transferring to a van, carrying her bags, etc. It was one of those moments where I just had to accept that mom was going to do what she wanted to do and in the end it wasn’t my problem.

So ditto Shot From Guns, I suspect ORD->MKE travelers are like my mom, they want to enter the hamster tube at one end, come out the other end at their final destination and not think about it in between. And thinking back to the days when I was a business traveler, honestly trying to be clever and resourceful was often more effort than it was worth, it’s easier to expense one airline ticket and one local rental car and not have to answer any questions from the guy in accounting.

And yes, rush hour traffic around ORD generally sucks. You could always read a book in the airport bar for an hour, that’s what I would do.

17

Frontier from Portland to Milwaukee via Denver isn’t an option? I flew that last year, and it was pleasant.

The drive on I-94 is very easy between the 2. I’ve driven down to ORD a number of times, but never specifically during late afternoon rush hour, and I don’t think I’ve encountered a problem, actually. For me, it’s always the Edens Expressway that is the start of my delays.

Also, assuming this trip would be in the near future, Wisconsin’s DOT is in the process of rebuilding the highway from Milwaukee to the state line. I haven’t been south of Milwaukee since last fall, at least, so I’m not sure how bad it is. But there may be some major delays in rush hour traffic on the WI side, too. Transport is Milwaukee is easy-peasy, imo.

18

I just did a basic search on kayak.com, I accepted the default departure date and changed the return date to the next day. I only looked at the first page of results, and I didn’t pay any attention to the airlines. Like I said, I was only curious; I wasn’t about to go hunting for the best deal out there when this trip is only a possibility.

The price range in my search was $450 - $500, and I did check to see how much I’d save by just flying into Chicago: about $30. So, renting a car and driving the rest of the way would most likely be more expensive. That’s fine with me - I’d rather spend a little extra money and save my sanity by not sitting around the airport for three hours.

Some may argue that driving in rush-hour traffic would be the insane thing to do… to each his own.

See, that’s no big deal. I lived in the Bay Area most of my life, so adding 30 to 60 minutes onto the trip wouldn’t be anything I’m not already used to. :slight_smile:

Hell, if money and time weren’t factors, I’d drive from Portland to Milwaukee.

19

Southwest flies between PDX and MKE, with several stopover airports that are not Chicago.

20

I didn’t say be smart, I said be different.:slight_smile: