Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
such as the Jungle Cruise. If you know a ride is popular, you need to learn a little
more about how it operates to determine when might be the best time to ride. But a
ride need not be especially popular to form long lines. The lines can be the result of
less-than-desirable traffic engineering; that is, it takes so long to load and unload that
a line builds up. This is the situation at the Mad Tea Party and Dumbo. Only a small
percentage of the visitors to Disneyland Park (mostly kids) ride Dumbo, for instance,
but because it takes so long to load and unload, this ride can form long waiting lines.
2. HOW DOES THE RIDE LOAD AND UNLOAD?
Some rides never stop. They are like a
circular conveyor belt that goes around and around. We call these continuous loaders.
The Haunted Mansion is a continuous loader. The more cars or ships or whatever on
the conveyor, the more people can be moved through in an hour. The Haunted Man-
sion has lots of cars on the conveyor belt and consequently can move more than 2,400
people an hour.
Other rides are interval loaders. This means that cars are unloaded, loaded, and
dispatched at certain set intervals (sometimes controlled manually and sometimes by
a computer). Matterhorn Bobsleds is an interval loader. It has two separate tracks (in
other words, the ride has been duplicated in the same facility). Each track can run up
to 10 sleds, released at 23-second or greater intervals (the bigger the crowd, the short-
er the interval). In another kind of interval loader, such as the Jungle Cruise, empty
boats return to the starting point, where they line up waiting to be reloaded. In a third
type of interval loader, one group of riders enters the vehicle while the last group of
riders departs. We call these in-and-out interval loaders. Indiana Jones is a good ex-
ample of an in-and-out interval loader. As a troop transport pulls up to the loading
station, those who have just completed their ride exit to the left. At almost the same
time, those waiting to ride enter the troop transport from the right. The troop trans-
port is released to the dispatch point a few yards down the line where it is launched
according to whatever second interval is being used. Interval loaders of all three types
can be very efficient at moving people if (1) the release (launch) interval is relatively
short and (2) the ride can accommodate a large number of vehicles in the system at
one time. Because many boats can be floating through Pirates of the Caribbean at a
given time and the release interval is short, almost 2,300 people an hour can see this
attraction.
A third group of rides are cycle rides. Another name for these same rides is stop-
and-go rides; those waiting to ride exchange places with those who have just ridden.
The main difference between in-and-out interval rides and cycle rides is that with a
cycle ride, the whole system shuts down when loading and unloading is in progress.
While one boat is loading and unloading in It's a Small World, many other boats are
