Should Disney get rid of the monorails?

Should Disney get rid of the monorails?

  • Yes

    Votes: 14 5.9%

  • No

    Votes: 74 31.0%

  • Only the EPCOT Monorail line

    Votes: 1 0.4%

  • Are you out of your mind??

    Votes: 150 62.8%
  • Total voters
    239
  • Poll closed .
Tom P.

Tom P.

Well-Known Member
No, Disney should not eliminate the monorails. And I don't believe they ever will. What Disney *should* do is drastically expand the monorail system to cover more parks and more resorts. Yes, it costs a lot of money and yes other forms of transportation are more cost effective. But what Disney *should* do is focus more on the guest experience and the show and realize that the monorails are the most iconically Disney method of transportation around WDW.
 
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TrojanUSC

Well-Known Member
helenabear said:
Maybe I'm missing something in how you are trying to describe, but you do get to spread out along the length of the train after security. I don't see any trains waiting for back up of guests to get on the monorail. In fact we missed a monorail because we reached security just as the monorail doors were about to close. No holding of a monorail for us.
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At the Polynesian and GF you do not. There is a small "holding" area about 1/4 of the train length but that's it. This causes a massive backup and forces the train to wait an excessive amount of time, on moderate to busy days, for people to be screened. It's designed this way so people exiting can have an easy exit and the platform CMs don't have to walk the length of the platform to open the gates.

See photo.

DSC_0300.JPG
 
correcaminos

correcaminos

Well-Known Member
trojanjustin said:
At the Polynesian and GF you do not. There is a small "holding" area about 1/4 of the train length but that's it. This causes a massive backup and forces the train to wait an excessive amount of time, on moderate to busy days, for people to be screened. It's designed this way so people exiting can have an easy exit and the platform CMs don't have to walk the length of the platform to open the gates.

See photo.

View attachment 334826
Click to expand...
That must be newer. We went further down than that. Then again there weren't any back ups when using it at Polynesian for us unless the line was down.
 
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thomas998

Well-Known Member
Phonedave said:
They don't have to get rid of ADA, just improve the process. The gondolas will work like a modern high speed ski lift, where the car can decouple from the high speed life line for loading.

Now the monorail is not continuous, but is batch loading, so that will not necessarily work, but Disney has it's fabled imagineers - but them to work. Devise a better ADA compliant loading system. Just spitballing, but what if they could load the wheelchairs and scooters on a side track in a separate carriage, before the main train came in, and then couple it onto the main train while it is being loaded.

Actually, is that even necessary. Somehow ADA compliant monorails (Orlando and Newark airport come to mind) run just fine without any special provisions. Just roll into the car when the doors open.
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Making a new spur near the loading/unloading area would be insanely expensive and involve considerable time delays cause from decoupling a monorail to connect to the ADA car on the spur, so even if the cost could be ignored it would take much longer to move that car on and off of the mainline.

As for the airports ADA working well with the wheelchairs, I believe a large part of that is the fact that at airports you are limited to wheelchairs supplied by the airport once you've gone past the security which means you can design a loading/unloading process with very specific wheelchairs in mind. At Disney you've got a wide variety of wheelchairs and scooters which are in various sizes so you can't as easily design a one size fits all loading system when the items loaded are going to vary. I think that's the reason they always pull out the actual ramps to that a wheeled device can be wheeled on without having to worry about wheels getting suck in the cracks between the train and the loading platform.

I think their engineers have already done about all they could hope to do given the constraints of the monorail. Even when they have an pretty much open slate to work on as they did when they were designing the Pooh ride in DL they were limited to how to deal with wheelchairs by the constraints a wheelchair imposes... if you've ever done the Pooh at DL when they are loading a wheelchair it can take only a little time or a lot of time depending on the type of wheelchair, we've see them do it in maybe 90 seconds and on one occasion it took more than 5 minutes because of size of the wheelchair and the medical equipment connected to it. That same problem will continually plague the monorail.
 
correcaminos

correcaminos

Well-Known Member
trojanjustin said:
The line for Poly and GF regularly stretch well into the lobby, with GF often being inside all the way down to the stairs.
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I'm just saying my experience at the Polynesian was not at all the same when we were there multiple times this year. We usually don't do monorails unless we're resort hopping at the Polynesian as the resort monorail is not my favorite so we do TTC or boats, but this last trip we did quite a few hops around. We rarely do monorails at GF so I can only speak of a handful of times there but wasn't bad.
 
tl77

tl77

Well-Known Member
As a "mass-transit system" the current monorail system and track layout is completely useless, but it was developed about 40 years ago, and was only intended to accommodate the hotels around the Seven Sea Lagoon, because that was the heart of the resort at that time. They only had the Poly, Contemporary, Fort Wilderness and Golf Resort at the time Epoct opened, and the hotel that became The Grand Floridian was scheduled to be built as far back as 1968, but back in 1982, and through out the 1980's, monorail system they had was a great system...

Everything ran through the Transportation and Ticket Center, if you were at the Golf Resort/Disney Inn (which is now Shades of Green), it was only a short bus ride to the TTC, and from there you could catch a monorail to either the Magic Kingdom or EPCOT Center, or if you were at the Fort Wilderness Campground, it was only a short boat ride to the Magic Kingdom or TTC

All the secondary systems, the boats and buses, fed into the main monorail system. The problem now is the that the old hub of the system, the Transportation and Ticket Center, isn't used for anything, none of the resort buses go there anymore. So they have this rather expensive monorail system that only about 25% of their resort guest have easy access to, and because the monorail is so ineffective as a "mass transit system" they have the added expense of running buses all across the property, all day everyday, so that their resort guests can access their parks.

I think the most logical thing to do, would be to fuse the Magic Kingdom express Monorail line with the Epcot line, and then extend that line to the Studios and Animal Kingdom... Create 1 monorail line that connects all 4 parks, and then create some kind of cheap secondary systems... like gondolas, to give the resort guests access to that 4 park monorail line. If they can have an automated/driverless monorail, that's powered by giant solar fields, it would reduce the need to have so many buses running all over the property all the time, and that type of monorail system would also probably encourage people buy the "park hopper" option on their new tiered ticketing system, making it not only cost effective but maybe even profitable... and if they announce something like this at D23 this summer I wouldn't be the least bit surprised, because I think they could certainly have it up and running by the 50th anniversary in 2021
 
jensenrick

jensenrick

Well-Known Member
Jim S said:
Disney should use some that handsome profit the parks made last year and convert the monorails into a first class operation again.

They are iconic Disney and there is absolutely no justification for letting any part of the park operations deteriorate to the point of the current monorail system.
Click to expand...

Amen to this!
 
networkpro

networkpro

Well-Known Member
In the Parks
Yes
trojanjustin said:
The line for Poly and GF regularly stretch well into the lobby, with GF often being inside all the way down to the stairs.
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This evening was a good example with everyone (including my DW) wanting to see the tree, gingerbread house, and listen to the band. Naturally the line made it to the large staircase and the monorail arrived full with few spaces available.

We walked back to the Poly rather than waiting in that mess.. Only about 10 minutes.
 
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TrojanUSC

Well-Known Member
networkpro said:
This evening was a good example with everyone (including my DW) wanting to see the tree, gingerbread house, and listen to the band. Naturally the line made it to the large staircase and the monorail arrived full with few spaces available.

We walked back to the Poly rather than waiting in that mess.. Only about 10 minutes.
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It is a mess. Poly last week had the line snaking past Kona, almost to the 'Ohana bathrooms.

They also need a separate line for guests with no bags. Two bag-less people waiting 45 minutes behind Ma and Pa Kettle with their three kids, two strollers, partridge and pear tree is a highly ineffective use of time and space.
 
JustAFan

JustAFan

Well-Known Member
This is a silly question. I understand you're asking "should" and not "will", but even still, this is silly and pointless. Sure, there are maintenance costs, but can you imagine the cost alone to remove the monorail? It's installed infrastructure. It's iconic. It's still widely used. Again, silly.
 
Phonedave

Phonedave

Well-Known Member
thomas998 said:
Making a new spur near the loading/unloading area would be insanely expensive and involve considerable time delays cause from decoupling a monorail to connect to the ADA car on the spur, so even if the cost could be ignored it would take much longer to move that car on and off of the mainline.
Click to expand...

Never said it had to be an ADA car that is comparable to an existing car. You could have a pre-loading mechanism. Who knows. That is the point, they are supposed to innovate, so innovate.

As for the airports ADA working well with the wheelchairs, I believe a large part of that is the fact that at airports you are limited to wheelchairs supplied by the airport once you've gone past the security which means you can design a loading/unloading process with very specific wheelchairs in mind. At Disney you've got a wide variety of wheelchairs and scooters which are in various sizes so you can't as easily design a one size fits all loading system when the items loaded are going to vary. I think that's the reason they always pull out the actual ramps to that a wheeled device can be wheeled on without having to worry about wheels getting suck in the cracks between the train and the loading platform.
Click to expand...

All good points except that the monorail at EWR is not airside. It's a three mile long monorail that stops at parking lots P1, P2, P3, Terminal A, Terminal B, Terminal C, Parking P4, and the Newark Liberty Airport NJ Transit Station and seems to load and unload an assortment of wheelchairs just fine. It is also automated - there are no drivers.

I think their engineers have already done about all they could hope to do given the constraints of the monorail. Even when they have an pretty much open slate to work on as they did when they were designing the Pooh ride in DL they were limited to how to deal with wheelchairs by the constraints a wheelchair imposes... if you've ever done the Pooh at DL when they are loading a wheelchair it can take only a little time or a lot of time depending on the type of wheelchair, we've see them do it in maybe 90 seconds and on one occasion it took more than 5 minutes because of size of the wheelchair and the medical equipment connected to it. That same problem will continually plague the monorail.
Click to expand...

While there are always going to be outliers to a designed system, you can engineer/plan accordingly. There are trade offs on any plan, but the key is to balance them appropriately.
 
NickMaio

NickMaio

Well-Known Member
Raineman said:
I'm sure all of the people from Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook will answer yes....especially if Disney uses Seld-M-Break parts in their monorails.
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I spit my coffee all over me reading this - - - - - awesome quote. Thanks for that:)
 

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