Mouse Transit

Just got back from a trip to Disney World.  Took my mother and her friend – and my wife! – for a five-day, non-thrill-ride tour of the parks.  A good time was had by most.

I often talk and write about Disney World.  I am a fan.  And I also mourn for the Disney of old, who seemed to give a better deal to their guests and had a better vision of what they wanted to accomplish.

If there is one place where Disney is really falling down, it is in their internal transit system.  The monorail is okay and their many ferries do pretty well.  But the bus system is terribly strained, to the breaking point.

It is either feast or famine.  The buses are either very empty or very full – and by “very full,” I mean every seat and every square foot of floor space is taken.  People are encouraged to push in as tight as they can get, some standing where they cannot even grab a handrail.

Now these buses often run at highway speeds on Disney World’s many roads.  It does not take too much imagination to envision one of these fully-packed buses striking a car, bus, stanchion, or rolling over in the ditch.  This kind of accident would have a body count, without a doubt.  Please understand, during the morning rush to the parks and the evening rush back to the hotels, the buses are generally just this crowded.

Adding to the problem, many guests are on scooters or wheelchairs and these take time to load and unload and take a lot of space inside.

I do not have an obvious solution.  The Disney folks must sit around thinking about this very problem.  I don’t think that adding another monorail track would solve the problem – neither does Disney or they would have done so already.

But I don’t think the monorail is the right template in any case.  Instead, they should consider something more along the lines of Tomorrowland’s People Mover.  Running on elevated tracks, cars holding no more than four people, propelled by linear induction, loading and unloading passengers on moving platforms, these cars would run slowly and closely together in the stations but would separate and speed up between stations.  The tracks and stations would all be covered, helping keep the cars lightweight.

Naturally, the system in Tomorrowland only has one station and is, therefore, easy to control.  The new system I have in mind would take that basic system and add more complexity to make it work well for people.  The track would not have to be one big loop; there could be a high-speed switching mechanism allowing branching and there would also be a branch leading into each station.

The first thing a guest would do upon entering a station and again when getting in a car is to select his destination and, if there is more than one person in the car, different destinations can be selected if wished.  Cars would only enter a station if one of the passengers had selected it or if it was empty and there were passengers waiting.

There would be a few depots along the way where excess cars can go and wait for demand to pick up, thereby simplifying routing and saving power.  There would have to be a few quick response teams – mechanic and EMT – driving around on Disney World’s streets, ready to respond to problems as they arise.

Each hotel, theme park, and other destination would be its own station and there would need to be at least one cast member at each station when open.  But compared to – what? – a hundred bus drivers on a shift, that probably constitutes a savings.  Maybe, depending on the level of automation, some stations might be unmanned during quieter periods, with random inspections by security and local cast members.

The theme parks would, in some way, have higher capacity stations, maybe multiple stations.  It would behoove Disney to stagger the closing times of their parks, which they probably already do for the sake of their bus and road systems.

For all the scooter drivers and the handicapped?  Maybe this system could be designed to accommodate them in a manner that does not act as a weight on the rest of the guests.  Maybe special cars that would synch up with a particular spot on the rotating platform where the needful guest is already waiting for it.  If not, perhaps a separate van service, like many cities run for those with mobility issues.

Thinking more about it as I type, this would need to be a very flexible system, with many branches, parallel tracks, and very scale-able.  This would allow Disney to introduce it in phases and work out the bugs as it grows.  It would be everything that the monorail system and the bus system are not.  It would be a twenty-first century answer to today’s problem, not a twentieth century answer with bright paint.

What I am describing could well be a billion dollar system.  Still, Disney has been known to spend that sort of money from time to time.  Maybe it would be worth it to them not to have their guests wasting so much time getting around their campus, not spending money.  To get from a park exit to a hotel can easily take over an hour sometimes.  And the increase in safety has to be worth something as well.

I do not expect that they will build something like this, however.  But they have to do something – the bus system is well past the breaking point already and only getting worse.  As for myself, next time I go, I may well use Uber to get around Walt Disney World.  When you are spending hundreds of dollars a day already, spending another twenty or thirty dollars for transportation can be a wise investment, if it gives you more time to enjoy.

Maybe that is the twenty-first century solution.

How it Began

How did we get into this whole renovation thing?  Not too hard to figure out.  Like so many of you, the house was too small.

Built twenty-five years ago, the house is a Cape Cod, 24X40, so about 1000 sf on the first floor, 500 sf upstairs, and the basement was finished around fifteen years ago, adding another 1000 sf, though it really doesn’t seem like it.  But it really comes down to usability.  For instance, the living room, with a brick wall fireplace on one whole wall, low windows, and archways in bad places, is extremely tight with just five people.  The kitchen is a small L-shaped thing with a triangular pantry closet and there is really only one place to stand in it to get things done and, of course, not enough storage, so we keep bulk supplies in the basement, where they really are not convenient.  Upstairs bedrooms, well, it is a Cape, so most of the walls only come up to shoulder height or lower.

So, when we came back from Missouri in 2007, we came up with a plan.  Well, blueprints too, but that is not what I meant.  Our master plan was simple: 1) sell the house in Missouri to help finance the construction, 2) buy a small-ish house in a neighboring hamlet to live in during renovation and allow the boys to go to a better school district, and 3) renovate the house.  This was, of course, the summer of 2007 – you remember what happened next.

Skip ahead a few months, we had a house in Missouri that we were not going to sell anytime soon and were looking into renting out, we had the temporary house, and we had our house with no possible way to finance a renovation.  Fine.  Fate smiled at Destiny and all that.  It was pretty much all we could do to keep up with three house payments.

But we did have plans drawn up – actually the winter before we came home.  This was a good plan for the time, with two boys entering high school.  We got a larger Master upstairs, plus something the architect dubbed a media room and a Master Bath.  Even a small balcony to sit on.  Larger living room, larger kitchen (now to be eat-in), a separate dining room, a bedroom to replace the one that was to become the dining room, and – blessed event – a garage!

I am sure we would have been comfortable in that house.  A pity we never got to build it.  Instead, we spent over five years scraping by, for the most part, renting the houses when we could.  Instead, the house fell deeper into a state of disrepair, because I only have rudimentary home repair skills and why fix something you are planning to replace soon?  Instead, we lived in a holding pattern, waiting for the world to change.

We now have a very different set of plans, based on the boys becoming young men and soon to be starting their own independent lives.  Also, we wanted something closer to single-story living, to help us through our golden years, which may still be a couple of decades off – hopefully – but we sure do not want to do another renovation then.

In a later edition: the long terrible tale of how our current house plans evolved.  Warning: that story contains viscous high-pressure salesmen.

 

A Breather

We are in the new (old) house.  Moved on Wednesday.  Still boxes everywhere and no idea where lots of things got to.  My Kindle managed to get packed somewhere – the packers were packing anything that didn’t move, except the food.  Luckily, I found a copy of “Time Enough for Love” lying around, so I am rereading that until I find the Kindle, which I have not been able to do, because…

I had to get back to work after numerous days off.  Then, after work on Saturday, we went to a costume party.  In Forest Hills.  To those not on Long Island, this is the one part of Queens that does not look like Archie Bunker would live there.  A very nice colony of brick homes that may be a hundred years old by the looks of them.  Then on Sunday, we went to a birthday party.  For a two-year-old.  In Connecticut.  That pretty much killed the day.

So, today was our first day in about a week and a half without some official thing to do.  We mostly did some stuff around the house and went to Costco to get things we need.

But now we have things we must do.  Tomorrow.  The Building Department, in a fit of governance, has decided that, by building out the back of the house, to pool in our back yard will become a pool in our side yard, and this requires, well, requirements.  Simply put, we will need a variance, which we are assured we will get, after jumping through significant hoops and paying significant dollars.  More on this later.

Meanwhile, I am just hoping to rest up, get some of my energy back, and get this house in order while getting a few last items out of the other house.  Construction will start soon, supposedly.

Haven’t heard from the bank in a while.