Perhaps instead of tearing down a third of DHS to accommodate SW:GE and replacing the GMR with Mickey, both attractions should have been used to EXPAND the park. The overall footprint in 2019 will be more or less the same as 1999, despite both those and TSL.
Wait! Let me check to see if it's too late to make that happen!
Actually, what was done is the first step to making DHS a hub and spoke park with loops instead of dead-ends.
How? The two entry points to SW:GE are about the same as walking into the Backlot area via Pixar Place or NY Street?
You make it sound like that's a good thing! Why should all parks be carbon copies of each other? The MK and DAK already follow that pattern.
Uniquely bad for guest flow
The MGM hub and spoke was formed when Mickey Avenue opened to guest foot traffic in early 1991.
Perhaps instead of tearing down a third of DHS to accommodate SW:GE and replacing the GMR with Mickey, both attractions should have been used to EXPAND the park. The overall footprint in 2019 will be more or less the same as 1999, despite both those and TSL.
Hopefully it's so ugly that the company understands the park needs more investment.
Tsk, tsk. Demagoguery. A similar map of the MK looks like a plate of spaghetti.
Perhaps it’s just me, but that looks just as if not more confusing. Maybe if it was a perfect grid it would work, but it’s not at all which is why the DHS layout is and always has been a bit of a mess.Tsk, tsk. Demagoguery. A similar map of the MK looks like a plate of spaghetti.
Even so, note how in your map of pathways one can notice another aspect of DHS' planological ordening: ever notice that there is a very fast, easy route between any two points? (Disregarding the later opened pathways in the back of the park, such as Mickey Avenue and new giant cumbersome loop of TS and SW Lands). From ToT to ST at the other end is a far easier walk than from SSE to the AA, or from Pirates to the Speedway.
However, it is the underlying organising principle that is the subject:
There is a hub-and-spoke for the MK, as simple as it is brilliant.
At EPCOT, the slightly less genius but still brilliant double fan of FW and the even better single path around a lake leading into cul-de-sac pavilions of WS.
And at DHS, the double grid pattern.
The main artery is aligned South to North in the MK, and North to South in EPCOT. So that both park's icons are basking in the sun from the main vantage points within the parks (yes, kids, the designers think about these things and people such as myself can read them when walking the parks as if they were written in a Simple English Wikipedia entry!). At DHS, to vary on this theme, the park stands at a perfect 45 degree North-South angle.
Each park differently organised. Rather than trying to mimic each other, which is a mistake. Variation between parks was and should be the goal!
These pics (b&w for clarity) are more useful than your spaghetti plate (which, again, actually looks quite organised compared to similar maps of the other three parks):
Two. Backlot theatre.
