A new Bus Depot at Magic Kingdom to allow for larger buses and therefore more capacity to move guests during peak transportation times at the resort. A recently filing at the local water district shows there will be 8 new load and unload zones added for the new longer buses. Disney will also do some landscaping in the area to allow for a slightly different water runoff pattern.
Update: Apparently at least a few of these stops will include transfer busses directly to Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Disney’s Animal Kingdom. That means guests looking to park hop won’t have to go all the way to the TTC to take another bus. That is indeed a nice change. However, what happens if you park at the TTC and then transfer via bus to DHS mid-day, how do you get back to the TTC at night to get to your car? Previously, your bus would drop you off there. Now you’ll have to walk all the way to the monorail or take a ferry back to the TTC at the end of the night… hard to please everybody, I guess. Might make more sense to bus it to the Polynesian and then walk to the TTC from there.
Frankly, this part of the Disney experience has always seemed ripe for re-invention to me. That’s not what we’re getting here. But not every improvement has to be nines and tens. Sometimes just some improved efficiency is okay. Still I would have been more impressed if they found a way that had some show elements to it or something that inspired one about the future. The end result here is still more walking and more queues for guests.
Agree with your conclusion – no innovation here, just expansion and accommodations for the larger buses (are these new buses?). The walk out of MK is long enough and for those that will ride buses in the new area, that only gets worse. That said, Epcot is no better and might even be worse in some cases. WIth so many resorts and guests to transport this part of the Disney experience is hard to improve on.
The bus system at WDW is, by far, my least favorite thing on property. Even when it is quick and efficient (it happened once) it is still a depressing and mundane chunk of reality between the magic of parks and resorts.
I understand that adding more tracks to the monorail is incredibly expensive, but Disney can afford it. Also, expanding existing waterways to make more locations accessible by boat would be a nice touch, too.
The difference between the Walt era way of conducting business and the Eisner/Iger era way of conducting business is stark. This is easily represented in the WDW transportation systems. The Walt era gave us sleek, futuristic monorails and the Eisner/Iger era is satisfied with black smoke spewing buses.
Disney could well afford to do the right thing, but they never will. Sadly, American corporations need to maximize profits (which includes cutbacks, aka buses) because the shareholder comes before the customer. Executives’ bonuses are based profits so there is more incentive not to do the right thing.
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