I absolutely agree with you that I prefer walking to waiting in almost all cases, but have definitely taken the Friendship boats once or twice when my feet just did not agree with me.
However, I think in general, most people prefer not to walk. Just think about the parking lots and the trams. You have to wait and fold up your stroller, etc, but most people still take those as opposed to just walking. Also, I think Disney would prefer to have people only in certain areas like most have said.
Everything I have read also indicates that there will not be buses provided on routes serviced by the gondola. I really don’t think that Disney will have any problem filling rooms at CBR and Riviera with direct, FAST transport to DHS. If people are too scared to ride then they can stay elsewhere. If you are too scared to ride the monorail they don’t bus you to MK.
Ask me 6 months ago and I never would have thought it was a “thing” to be afraid of a gondola! Especially the Disney ones that are like feet off the ground. The monorail is actually up higher!
If the monorail breaks, it’ll just sit there. The cable breaks, and all those Gondolas go plummeting to the ground! Even if the chances of that are slim to none, it doesn’t do anything to alleviate my vivid imagination!
I’ve been on cable-car type rides before (Sky Ride at CP) and it is absolutely terrifying for me. I thought I was going to have a panic attack when I was young and we took this Gondola over the raging river in Niagara Falls.
Monorail doesn’t bother me. Coasters don’t bother me. These things? No way, no how.
I think everyone is underestimating how long it will take to load scooters on the gondola. A large rush of people is going to result in a backlog jyst like the buses. Maybe they’ll run buses at park close?
Does anyone out there have the theoretical hourly capacity for the gondola system?
I think they might have a bypass system for this. At a station, there can be two paths an empty Gondola takes. The first is for normal loading, but if a Gondola is needed to take more time, it can be pulled to a separate track and loaded in parallel to the normal loading. This would prevent significant slow downs.
in addition, the gondolas in the station are on a separate drive system from the gondolas that are on the cables…so if loading slows down, the whole system doesn’t necessarily slow down
That must be the total number for 6 different pathways (Pop to CBR, CBR to Pop, CBR to HS, HS to CBR, CBR to EP and EP to CBR). I was under the impression these were smallish gondolas (like 6-8 people). If I assume 8 per gondola, 5000 pph would be around 600 gondolas per hour, 10 gondolas per minute, or 6 seconds per gondola (<1 second per rider getting on). If I assume 100 gondolas per hour per loading station, now it is 36 seconds to load a gondola. That sounds more believable to me.
Am I way off? Please correct me if you see any glaring errors with my thought process.
Regardless, even if it is 5000 pph total and only 833 pph at each loading station, it will be faster than the buses by a lot, if they can stay close to that load rate. That, and the fact that it should be a continuously moving line rather than a stagnant bus waiting line make me feel a lot better about the whole thing. I won’t be there until it has been in operation for over a year, so everyone else can check it out and let me know how it works in practice. My hope is that other than peak times, I will be able to walk right up and get on a gondola and be on my way, which would be as close to perfect as I can ask for.
Does your fear of riding the gondolas taking this into account, that the cars are actually removeable from the cable without any use of tools? Probably one swift gust of wind and they’ll fly away!
Well, in severe weather, they won’t run them, so that’s a possibility, I suppose! Although, I’m sure the engineers have designed in counter measures for that. Some kind of inertial dampeners or something built into the gondolas.
You are pretty accurate here. They will move fast and there are a lot of cars. The loading deck is flush with the gondola floor, so folks who are proficient with their wheelchair or stroller can push right on. It shouldn’t take more than seconds to enter. There will be a separate boarding section for folks who need more time. Plus, the gondolas come completely off of the line to be in the station, so there may be 10 moving slowly through the station, but they dispatch them onto the line every 6 seconds.
Here is Cedar Point’s Sky Ride station. The Gondolas at Disney will effectively be a glorified version of this. Here, you can see the Sky Ride gondolas parked in the station for the winter:
That makes sense, it just seems like it will be a lot of gondolas to store like that. How far does the CP one travel? Disney is going to have something like a mile of cable distance round trip between CBR and EP, which I would think is going to be around 100 gondolas.
Disney will likely have a more efficient storage system…perhaps a separate area that isn’t so visible. I’ve not paid attention to that. I’ll have to see if any spy photos hint at where they store them exactly. But it will be at the stations themselves.
Not sure. Maybe 1/4 mile. Of course, WDW itself used to have a sky ride as well. The remnants of the old sky ride station was in existence up until they did the Fantasyland rennovation just recently! Used to take guests between Tomorrowland and Fantasyland back in the day.
Even if the chances of that are slim to none, it doesn’t do anything to alleviate my vivid imagination!