Comments on: Walt Disney World Monorail Crashes, Shattering Dream

By: Rust Paint :

Rust Paint : — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:42:36 +0000

my kids love to go disneyworld, i think every kid would love to go there;;.

By: Daniel Prats

Daniel Prats — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:31:11 +0000

‘Tell me — what city is NOT “artificial”?

Depends. What “city” keeps out non-paying customers?’

All of them, just try not paying your taxes and see how long it takes them to kick you out.

By: Daniel M. Laenker

Daniel M. Laenker — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:56:24 +0000

Tell me — what city is NOT “artificial”?

Depends. What “city” keeps out non-paying customers?

By: AaronS

AaronS — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:14:03 +0000

I’m stunned by this article and some of these comments. People decry the “artificiality” of DisneyWorld. Tell me — what city is NOT “artificial”? If Disney is able to implement a higher standard, what is wrong with our culture that allows us to accept “good enough” in the places we live?

People who think that light rail is better than monorail obviously haven’t paid much attention to the news of late (save for news of the first monorail death in 38 years from Orlando). In the past month, there was one monorail accident world-wide.

Two teens were killed in a light rail accident in MD, dozens were injured in a light rail accident in CA, a garbage truck got turned in to garbage and two people injured in a light rail accident in NJ, a car got creamed by a light rail train in Seattle, a cab got nailed in AZ, and two accidents near Trenton resulted in a bicyclist losing his leg and another person getting killed. Seriously, just Google it. There’s more, but I quit counting.

Give me grade-separated monorail ANY day of the week.

By: Michael Dresser

Michael Dresser — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:33:09 +0000

Excellent article. I’ve posted a link from my blog and have added the transportpolitic to my blogroll. Keep up the good work.
Michael Dresser
The Baltimore Sun

By: Van contract hire

Van contract hire — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:35:06 +0000

Disney said it was the first fatal crash in the monorail’s 38-year history in the park.

By: Nathanael

Nathanael — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:35:06 +0000

‘The only reason to build a monorail would be to make it less “visually intrusive” and thus politically acceptable to have an elevated line in an existing urban setting (and saving the cost of tunneling).’

I think you’ve got it. Monorail fans really like to show images of…

‘There was a design for a single-beam monorail (trains operating on either side of the beam) that would have fit that standard.’

…that design.

However, it doesn’t meet modern safety standards, because it’s too difficult to get out of a stuck train. Add escape walkways and you end up with something which looks pretty much just like a normal elevated train.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:07:45 +0000

“Similarly, the Disney environment, in which everyone is a paying — and, therefore, an acceptable — guest, is completely inapplicable to actual urban environments.”

Technically, if you feel like it, you can go and ride Disney’s transit system for completely free. Park at Downtown Disney or Wide World of Sports and then enjoy all the buses or monorails to your heart’s content.

“These parks encourage the idea that we should expect our transit systems to be clean as a whistle and full of kind, wonderful people, two expectations that are impossible to fulfill in a society where a significant percentage of the population lives below the poverty line.”

So poor people are mean and dirty?

By: AlexB

AlexB — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:19:15 +0000

There is a big difference between Futurism and Tomorrowland, Main St and New Urbanism, and the Disney monorail and elevated trains. The different aspects of Disneyworld are caricatures of things that exist in the popular imagination, not urban planning proposals. Relating the monorail and the park to a city is a fascinating idea, but only by analogy. To say that the theme park influences the city or people’s perception of it is not accurate.

As a kid, Main St was an annoying place I had to get through to get to the rides. I hated “It’s a Small World” then and I do now. When I passed the ice cream parlor, I knew even then that it wasn’t a real ice cream parlor and the people working there did not live down the road in the thing that looked vaguely like a house. That’s where my mom got me the Mickey Mouse ears hat. I knew the difference even as a little kid between the things that made me smile and the things that excited me. Tomorrowland is where you ride Space Mountain, NASA is where they design the space station. I didn’t need a college degree for that.

Just because an idea is represented in a pleasing way doesn’t necessarily mean the representer expects the idea to become reality. We often look at pictures of our childhood and think about fond memories and tell stories. We don’t necessarily want to go back to high school. Disney World is fantasy, it’s escapist. It’s based on our sense of nostalgia and memory about places we have been or imagined or seen in movies. Disney created an amazing piece of theater based on real places, but that is very distinct from a proposal for any kind of urban ideal. To portray it as so is to assume people are way less intelligent than they are and miss the point of having fun.

By: Norman Brown

Norman Brown — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:52:05 +0000

Is “renowned urban planner James Rouse” the same as the “mall in the city” planner that leveled the bustling rustic market at Haymarket in Boston to replace it with Gap and Brookstone stores?