Originally posted by niteobsrvr
Unless something has changed in the past year, which I admit is entirely possible, Disney doesn't adjust their system in cases of rain or for parade exits. It would be nearly impossible to do so, especially the later parades like SpectroMagic beacuse you also have exit considerations at at least 1 other park if not 2. Part of this has to do with the way scheduling and the union contracts are structured.
As a side note, one of the reasons the Parade and Fireworks are scheduled the the way they are at MK is in an effort to smooth demand for transportation and alleviate general traffic congestion. You can see what happens on nights like 4th of July and New Years when there is a mad rush to leave the park (s).
That was my point. With the monorail system in place they can’t logistically even if they want to - be it hourly, weekly or seasonally really. . There is no amount. That is why the express monorail has long waits during these kinds of situations with standing room at maximum capacity and why they have empty cars in some trains at other times of the day. Sure, they may be able to scale down with the monorails but they can’t scale up and running in a loop has it’s own set of problems, especially for the resort monorails. Lets face it, getting to and from any of the parks during peak times is never really an ideal situation but which one is the worst?...
Originally posted by niteobsrvr
For guests to be able to understand the system instantly, it is up to the engineers and planners to take this into consideration when designing and planning a system. The better job they do, the easier it all becomes. The trick here is you have to think like someone using the system vs. an engineer or planner. It is that crucial shift of perspective that often makes most designs a little less than ideal once they are completed in reality.
And in most cases, the easiest solution for guests to understand is the simplest. The simplest solution for a guest would be able to get on one vehicle that takes them from where they are to where they want to go with minimal wait… We have a system like this in my city. They are called cabs. Unfortunately, since only one or two people tend to want to originate from the same point and go to the same location at the same time, they aren’t very cost efficient. That is why we also have busses which make multiple stops, in loops and 90% of the time requires transfers to get from one place to where you want to go which can be confusing and requires a lot of additional waiting… All I’m saying is that a larger monorail system in Disney would be a lot like the busses in my city - more waiting, more confusing, less direct and less specific to the individual rider’s needs. Since Disney has a consistently large number of people going from point “A” to point “B” or point “A’ to point “G” or point “D” to point “A” it is a lot easier to look at their busses as working the way cabs do around here.
Monorail’s are more fun – I’ll give you that – and if they were working optimally to where they met or beat the busses in terms of their primary purpose (cost and time efficiently getting guests from one location to another with the least possible intervention required by the guests) I would be all for them but with a fixed rail system I don’t see how they could. Unless they came up with something offering the ability to switch tracks in real time (sort of the monorail equivalent of a passing lane) it doesn’t seem very likely. I could see them building building bus only roads to elevate traffic and ensure properly scheduled departure and arrival times before something like this even if a light rail does come from the airport to property.In actuality, that is the one time when a fixed rail might make sense because it would be difficult for Disney to set up a hub at the airport itself that would take people directly to their individual resorts from that central location but once on property where Disney is free to build a station of the style and size of their choosing it would still be quicker and easier to take a bus directly to your resort than to get on another monorail or lightrail that may or may not require a transfer and deal with half a dozen stops on the way… And the transfer thing is a whole other can of worms. If guests get confused trying to figure out how to get to Epcot from the Contemporary when there is only one transfer at that point, I don’t see how a newer system that would almost have to be more complicated would help things.
I realize it is easier to be a pessimist about things like this because it is always easier to poke holes in someone else’s theory than it is to come up with your own but I honestly think busses in some form [be they diesel, corn either, electric, fuel cell, boat, Moller (
www.moller.com) or some new technology yet to be invented or widely implemented] will probably be the transportation of choice around WDW for the foreseeable future rather than any kind of a fixed rail and not just because of cost.
Originally posted by niteobsrvr
We have drifted this thread a fair amount from its original intention to discuss the addition of a Monorail line from the airport to Disney. It was not my intent to end up discussing the parks transportation issues but to discuss issues related to moving people to and from the entire property itself. As Ii beleive I stated or implied earlier, once the government bodies and Disney decide how the regional systems are going to be developed and interfaced with WDW, then, and only then, can Disney take an effective long-term look at how to move people around the resort property.
I agree and I actually meant to respond in agreement to the last part of your last post but got a little side tracked. Believe it or not I hadn’t intended to get into this big debate either because it never ever goes anywhere. I just have this tendency to go off in every possible direction in a singe post to cover all my angles which usually gets me in more trouble than I’m trying to get out of when I start… I’d like to say that it was sort of refreshing to get someone from the ‘other camp’ that had more than just “monorails are more ‘magical’” or “monorails are better” to head up their argument with. Usually, people wanting monorails come into this without much thought and then come up with plans for how a monorail system could work that rivals the schematics of a microprocessor in terms of complexity.
