Disney, Reedy Creek Examining Slow Monorail Evacuation

This Orlando Sentinel article examines why it took so long to evacuate those who got trapped on a monorail car in last week's incident when the monorail system lost power.

Several factors may have contributed to the delay. Disney, for instance, did not call for assistance evacuating passengers until 35 to 40 minutes after the system lost power, according to the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the semi-autonomous government that handles fire-rescue at Disney World.

Further, a $250,000 scissor-lift vehicle that Reedy Creek purchased earlier this year to help with large-scale monorail evacuations was too short to reach the point along the monorail beam where the train was stuck.

I've been on the WDW monorail countless times. I loved it so much, I've even made a video out of it. Still, this is one of the most inefficient and frustrating piece of transportation that Disney has. You'd think that if you take the express monorail from the Transportation and Ticket Center (TTC) to go to the Magic Kingdom, it shouldn't take THAT long, considering that there are no other stops in between. But noooooo... often that is not the case.

First, let's examine how slow it is for the monorail to open its doors when it pulls into the station. It stops, and often, it backs up or move forward a bit, just to get it in the right position. It sometime can take a minute after it pulls in for the doors to finally open to let passengers out. And then a few more seconds for either the other doors to open, or for the incoming passengers to be let in. And then, to add to the delay, the doors tend to stay open for quite a while. Now, to be fair, this may not always be the monorail's fault, since it can take a bit of time for passengers to find an empty car if it is busy, and the loading of passengers in wheelchairs or when assistance is needed can delay this a bit. Still, all in all, it takes a long time for the whole loading/unloading of passengers to occur. In other words, this is not run the way a rapid transit system in your friendly city is run. This is why another monorail behind this train often has to slow down or even stop on the tracks - a monorail in front of it takes just way too long to finish loading. Next time you go on the monorail, try to time how long it is in the station, and compare that to a typical rapid transit train.

Of course, when it is busy, the train just simply do not zip through from one station to another. Inevitably, it will be slowed down, or even stopped along the way to get clearance, etc. (see above for a possible reason). In fact, when you ride the tram from your car to the TTC station, often, the tram conductor will mention that taking the monorail or the boat to the Magic Kingdom will roughly take the same amount of time (!!!). You'd think that a slow boat cannot compare with the monorail, but that claim of them taking almost the same amount of time isn't an exaggeration at all. The monorail CAN be THAT slow!

The frustrating thing is that when it is needed the most, i.e. during the busy hours when MK closes, that is when the monorail is the slowest. I don't know whether the whole system needs to be overhaul, but this is one aspect of WDW that Disney doesn't do it better than the rest of the "real" world.

Zz.