The monorail is an iconic part of the Disney experience, and for good reason.
When Walt opened the Disneyland monorail in 1959 it was the very first instance of a daily
running monorail in the Western Hemisphere.
It evolved from a simple attraction to an actual means of transportation and so naturally
when it came time to build Walt Disney World, it was included as a means for guests to get around.
However one question I’ve gotten from subscribers many times over the years is “Why stop at
the Magic Kingdom and Epcot?
Why isn’t there a monorail to Hollywood Studios or the Animal Kingdom or more resorts?
Where are all the monorails?”
Now there’s probably already a bunch of people writing up comments like “It’s
too expensive! There, I saved you six minutes!” and you know what?
They’re not wrong.
While a monorail extension would be financially possible for The Walt Disney Company, it wouldn’t
be very financially reasonable, and I’ll go into why in a moment.
However beyond just the fiscal considerations, I think there’s an argument to be made that
it just isn’t the right system anymore in relation to what Walt Disney World has become.
But first, the money issue.
This one is a little difficult to tackle because as they are with many details, Disney is pretty
tight lipped when it comes to how much they’re spending on specific projects.
There are figures out there for other monorail systems around the world and we can try to
use those to estimate what it would cost for Disney, but even that’s going to be a guess
since there are so many different variables to consider.
Looking at more recent monorail systems, the Mumbai Monorail in India cost an estimated
$43.8 million dollars per mile.
The Las Vegas Monorail cost an estimated $88 million per mile, and coming in at the top,
the Palm Jumeirah Monorail in Dubai cost around $118 million dollars per mile.
That’s a pretty wide range.
If we aim for the middle we would land at $80.5 million, which isn’t far off from
the Vegas estimate which, as far as supplies and labor go, is probably the closer to Orlando
than Mumbai and Dubai is.
Then of course we have to consider that those three systems were all built between 2004
and 2008, so when we adjust the estimates for inflation, that $80.5 million becomes
$100.4 million.
We’ll round down to a clean hundred million for the sake of simplicity.
The next question then becomes, how long would a new monorail extension be?
Now that becomes a real wild card because by owning the land, Disney would have a lot
more freedom to build the track wherever they want, within reason.
I took a stab at a track layout that would extend from the Epcot track, which saves us
about 4 miles, and sticks towards roads much in the same way the Epcot line does.
That would put an extension to both Hollywood Studios and the Animal Kingdom at around twelve
miles of new track.
At an estimation of $100 million per mile, that’s $1.2 billion dollars.
So to my earlier point, it’s financially possible.
The Walt Disney Company’s 2017 annual earnings report showing that Parks and Resorts had
operating income of $3.7 billion dollars that year.
But would it make sense to spend upwards of a third of the entire division’s profit
on just two new monorail stops?
Consider for a moment that it would only benefit two groups.
Those who are staying at one of the three monorail resorts out of the over twenty resorts
on property, and those looking to park hop, which is a feature that isn’t even standard
with a Disney World pass today.
Don’t get me wrong, it’d be pretty cool if the Disney World monorail went to all the
parks, but even as a die-hard fan I’d admit that the costs are just too high for benefits
that are too few.
Not to mention for the same amount of money, you could buy literally thousands of buses.
And this kind of leads me to my second argument, which is that the monorail just isn’t the
best method anymore.
Walt Disney proposed a project that would have, while inhabiting the same space as today’s
Disney World, looked radically different.
His Disney World was one that was more or less arranged north to south.
There was the airport at the south end, then the welcome center, followed by the industrial
park, followed by EPCOT, and then at the northern tip the theme park and resorts.
It was the perfect layout for a monorail system that would run through the middle of everything
and connect these different segments of the property.
Now today we have the hindsight that allows us to realize that Walt’s dream died with
him, but it’s important to note that to the public at the time, it took much longer than that.
When Walt’s brother Roy postponed his retirement to oversee the construction of Disney World,
it was with the goal of completing the first phase of Walt’s Disney World.
Years later, while the form changed quite a bit, Disney still committed to delivering
an EPCOT to the public, and like Walt’s plan for Disney World, it was just south of
the theme park area.
It wasn’t until shortly after EPCOT Center opened that the company underwent a radical
change in leadership, and it was then that we began to see Disney evolve into something else.
More resorts, more theme parks, more water parks.
With the figurative change in direction Disney World also saw a literal change in direction,
with more projects springing up to the west and east portions of the property.
Without that tight layout, the idea of a monorail system became less practical.
Suddenly transportation like buses were not only the cheaper option, but they were the better option as well.
Pair that with the costs needed to expand it and the price tag of all the other projects
Disney was getting involved in as a company, and it’s no surprise that we didn’t get more monorails.
Today we’re seeing transportation expansions in the form of bigger buses and Minnie vans
and even gondolas.
And with automated driving becoming bigger and bigger with each year, who knows what
transportation at Disney World will look like in the future.
So while we’ll hopefully see some new monorail vehicles at the resort in the near future,
it’s pretty unlikely it’ll be making any new stops.