I have been thinking about the various comments said online about how WDI just can't build high capacity rides anymore and how they spend so much money on rides. Here is my long reflection on WDI and Universal Creative:
The reason why you rarely see high capacity rides as in say over 1500 guests an hour is two folds: ride safety regulation has gotten quite more severe and the guests slow down operation a lot.
On the ride regulation subject, look no further than Seven Dwarves Mine Train. Originally supposed to have comfortable T shaped lap bars, we ended up with the current tight U bars installed in a space not designed for them. Look at how many adults struggle to get the bar closed and then think of many lost dispatches you get over an hour. Splash Mountain received those lap bars and it made things difficult for cast members as unlike Tokyo, the Florida station was not designed for lap bars. Again, you slow things down and capacity suffer. Adding air gates to all the rides also slow things down.
On the subject of slow guests, think back say 25 years ago: how many guests did you see that required more time to load? Going back to Seven Dwarves Mine Train, even with the ADA seat, it is still a struggle for many guests and you end up with cases where with 5 trains on the ride.... two will be waiting behind the station and the fifth will probably stop at the top of B lift. By the time you get all the trains moving again on the correct interval, you've lost one or two dispatch (so 20 or 40 guests less that hour).
To give you an idea of how things used to be, I give you the example of Space Mountain at Disneyland Paris, prior to the 2005 refurb. For 10 years, that ride ran with 5 trains at once and with no air gates in the station, end result was a capacity on paper rated at 2400 guests an hour. To give you an idea, 2400 guests is pretty much a walk in the waiting line to the station with how fast you're loading guests on. Two cast members assigned seats in the double station and the robust Vekoma ride system even capable of adding and removing trains while the ride was running. With no air gates, guests stayed behind a red line and it was the load cast member and dispatch cast members duties to look at the guests to make sure no guests got too close. Disabled guests had two severe rules: you needed to be able to walk the length of the station to sit in the back car and you had to be able to go up and down stairs on your own. Temple Du Peril, Peter Pan's Flight and later Crush Coaster also had the same rules, but they were relaxed a few years ago.
So with all that in mind, how many guests was Space Mountain able to move in real life? 2350-2375 an hour. We simply could not run out of Fast Pass on busy days and guests would have maybe a return time 45-50 minutes later in the worst cases. Sadly, the 2005 refurb brought modernity to Space Mountain and it can now run only 4 trains on two stations or 2 trains on a single station, shrinking capacity to 1700-1800 guests for 4 or 700-800 for two. Air gates were also added and it made loading slower as well. So poor Space Mountain went from the highest capacity single track coaster in the world to one that struggles with lines all the time. I can't count the times where I waited close to 25-30 minutes with a fast pass now.
Walt Disney Imagineering has all those things to deal with when designing rides now. They sometimes hit homeruns like the separate ADA loading station and the ride system for Pirates in Shanghai. Other times, they miss completely and deliver to Operations rides with no capacity.
One time Universal Creative messed with a high capacity ride is at Universal Studios Japan. Picture this: they finally built a high capacity roller coaster that could do more guests per hour than DLP Space Mountain. Its a Bolliger & Mabillard Hyper Coaster (like Mako at SeaWorld Florida) with a double station like Big Thunder Mountain. They could run 5 36 passenger trains on Hollywood Dream at once and get numbers that would make any other parks red with jealousy. So what did our good friends at Universal Creative do? Let's add Backward trains and call it "Backdrop"! Only one slight problem: they kept forward trains as well...
End result is this operational disaster: one Universal Express line, a single riders line for Backdrop, a regular line for Backdrop and a regular line for plain forward facing Hollywood Dream. You end up with standard line that barely moves since they also split Universal Express tickets where you get specific Forward or Backdrop slots. They also had to modify all the trains since to keep the same capacity, they had to install a second mechanical release system in both stations for the Backdrop trains and this lead as well to losing the restraint sensors. They now work with low tech pieces of tape placed on the lap bar and someone able to fit on Mako would require the bar to be shoved a good inch further in. On average, each train has 1-2 guests who can't fit and this again slows down the lines a lot.
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