If you’ve ever been to the resort in Orlando, Florida, you know that Walt Disney World is
virtually a small city, with four theme parks, two water parks, a downtown shopping district,
and over twenty hotels.
Each of the parks themselves can have tens of thousands of guests a day visiting, and
with many of those visitors staying at one of the Disney resorts it means they need a
way to get around.
While Disney offers everything from the iconic monorail, to the brand new skyliner, perhaps
the most ubiquitous and far reaching transportation system is their bus fleet.
So how big is a bus system that has to serve what is practically a small city, every day of the year?
Well the short and quick answer is that it takes a fleet of 400 buses to cover over 520
miles of bus routes.
In the bigger picture, that’s a bus network that rivals the St. Louis MetroBus transportation system.
It makes the Disney World bus system the 52nd largest in the country, putting it above cities
like New Orleans, Seattle, and its next door neighbor, Orlando.
In fact, it’s ranked as the third largest fleet in the state of Florida, behind Miami-Dade’s
760 buses, and Broward County Transit’s 548 buses.
Now 52 is pretty far down the list, so if you’re wondering how that compares to the
bigger fleets in the country, consider for a moment the New York City bus system.
With a fleet of 5811, the New York City MTA’s buses transport an average of 2.2 million
people on any given weekday through 312 bus routes across over 16,000 bus stops.
The next largest system after that is the New Jersey Transit Corp, with 3382 buses,
and then taking third there’s the LA County MTA with 2320 buses.
Now depending on how you measure a bus network, Disney’s can be larger than their nearest
counterpart: St. Louis.
The St Louis system sports 408 buses that cover 75 routes.
The Disney World system has fewer buses with 400, but more routes.
If you count every resort to park route there is, as well as the park to park routes, Disney
springs and water park routes, and the two internal bus systems at Fort Wilderness and
the Caribbean Beach, there are 112 different bus routes utilized daily.
That doesn’t include the Disney Magical Express buses, however, as those are a separate
system that is run in partnership with Mears.
It’s worth mentioning that not every hotel has a bus to every park.
Some, like the Polynesian and Grand Floridian connect to both the Magic Kingdom and Epcot
via monorail, so they don’t have buses that go there.
Similarly, the Yacht and Beach club resorts are just a five minute walk from Epcot, so
they don’t offer buses to that park.
It’s also worth mentioning that the number changes throughout the day.
For instance during peak hours all three All-Star resorts might get their own bus to each of
the theme parks, but in the middle of the day when there’s less resort-to-park travel,
one bus can stop at all three resorts before going to its respective park.
So like any other large transit system, it adapts and changes to meet demand.
When it comes to all of those bus routes, they average out at 5 miles in length, with
the low end being the Caribbean Beach to Hollywood Studios route at one mile, and the high end
being the Animal Kingdom Lodge to Magic Kingdom route at 8.3 miles.
Now that many buses and routes must mean a lot of fuel.
Disney unfortunately doesn’t share that number publicly, but if we use St. Louis as
a comparison, their fleet uses just shy of 5 million gallons of diesel a year, and costs
the city $15 million dollars.
In 2015, as a part of their continuing effort to reduce their environmental footprint, Disney
switched their fleet over to something called R50 fuel.
It is considered a renewable diesel, which is similar to bio-diesel in that it’s made
from cooking oils and non-consumable food wastes, but it’s still processed in a way
similar to how traditional petroleum diesel is.
That’s important, because it means that it can be used in a traditional diesel engine,
meaning organizations like Disney or cities like Oakland in California, who also made
the change in 2015, can switch fuels without having to upgrade or retrofit their entire
bus fleet.
Disney estimated that the switch to R50 fuel would cut their bus fleet’s greenhouse emissions
by 50%, and that the drop would mean an overall reduction in emissions at Disney World by 3.5%
As a side note: It’s a change that was hailed by their VP of animals, science, and environment,
Dr. Jackie Ogden, which is a name that might be familiar to some of you if you’ve ever
ridden Flight of Passage at the Animal Kingdom.
The pre-show character was named after the real life doctor.
In any case, the Walt Disney World bus system is just one of the many elements of the resort
that remind us of just how complex and far reaching the vacation destination is.
It truly does take the work and effort of a small city to turn the gears of Disney World,
and it’s another reason why the cast members are the most important part of making the magic.