When President Bush visited the area in March, he gave a speech at the airport, then headed to Sewickley Hills for a private reception.

To get there, his motorcade headed south toward Pittsburgh on the Parkway West, then north on Interstate 79 -- a route that was possible only because of his exalted position.

There are, of course, no ramps to allow a left-hand turn from the Parkway West to I-79 north. President Bush "had to go south on 79 and bump across the median," Bill Hunt, of the Elmhurst Group, said Friday at a breakfast gathering of the Airport Area Chamber of Commerce.

That embarrassing moment -- bumping the president over a median -- is a good analogy, Mr. Hunt said, for the situation that has faced the airport area business community in recent years: It's a wonderful climate for business but some missing elements have made for a bumpy road.

In addition to the missing ramps, other barriers have been the lack of an interstate designation for the Parkway West and a dearth of pad-ready building sites served by sewer lines, water lines, gas lines, power lines and roads. The situation, however, is changing.

The missing ramps are under construction.

The Parkway and Route 60 have been dubbed "the future I-376 corridor." The Findlay Connector has opened new land for development and has eased connections into the West Virginia panhandle. The interchange of Route 60 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike is free of tolls and toll booths.

And places such as Chapman Commerce Park, Clinton Commerce Park, McLaren Woods Business Park, Westport, Cherrington and the Turnpike Distribution Center, among others, have both buildings and building sites available with full services.

"We have the opportunity right now to capitalize on some exceptionally good news," said Rick O'Brien, of Grubb & Ellis real estate firm. He said the lack of available sites in 2007 has driven up rental rates just as new infrastructure is becoming available, creating a "perfect storm" for commercial real estate.

Other speakers echoed those ideas.

Sam DiCicco, of DiCicco Development, noted that Cherrington Parkway's connection to Ewing Road in Moon opened two weeks ago, making available three developed pads owned by his company. He also announced that Hilton would build two hotels -- a 128-room Hilton Gardens Inn and a 121-room Homewood Suites -- in the Millennium business park near Glaxo-Smith Kline in Moon.

He expects to build offices on the Cherrington sites and more offices on a parcel behind the hotels.

"Over the last year, we've really noticed an increased demand for Class A suburban office space," he said, and that demand yields vacancy rates much lower than the overall numbers.

Mr. Hunt said available spaces at the Pittsburgh Airport Business Park have "filled up pretty quickly with smaller operators" and that the Airside Business Park in the old airport terminal has two new tenants, mortgage firm Balboa and sporting goods firm adidas, which wanted to be near the headquarters of Dick's Sporting Goods.

"They wanted to be here, to be near one of the region's biggest retailers," Mr. Hunt said.

He also said business is booming at McLaren Woods, which offers a hybrid of distribution and speculative manufacturing space. Three buildings are complete there, another is under construction and two more are in the planning stages and "we're filling them up as we go."

Mr. Hunt said an advantage McLaren Woods offers is the high-end design. "It's not just more efficient, it also helps with recruitment of employees," he said.

And DeWitt Peart, of the Allegheny Conference and the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, noted that Pittsburgh in general and the airport area in particular are players in the global economy, not just the national one.

He said a European business magazine recently named Pittsburgh as the most cost-effective region for business in North America, that promising efforts are being made to establish direct flights to and from Amsterdam, and that huge opportunities exist in the other direction as well.

"In the last 60 days, three investment delegations have visited us from China," he said. "There is a tremendous desire on the part of Chinese investors to get their money out of China."

Mr. Peart said the Chinese are drawn to Pittsburgh because it offers a "clean slate" compared with other regions, offering sites where they can build on a grand scale.

The key is to keep eliminating the bumpy medians, or, as Mr. O'Brien put it, "infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure."

Mr. Hunt said leaders should keep the pressure on, pushing to get the I-376 designation in place, to extend the Findlay Connector southeast to I-79 and even to get talks going again on Crow's Run, the long-sought but currently dormant plan to connect I-79 in the Cranberry area to Route 60 in Beaver County.

"Highways are our arteries," he said. "They carry our life blood."