Beyond Tiki, Bilge, and Test / Beyond Tiki / Why Disneyland Sucks
Post #351271 by Cammo on Wed, Dec 26, 2007 7:39 AM
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Wed, Dec 26, 2007 7:39 AM
Part 2 In the old days, it was easy. The Disneyland parking lot in front was designed to hold 15,000 cars. This included employee parking, though, bringing Guest spaces down to as little as 10-12,000. The math is simple – at 3 people per car, that’s 33,000 guests per day, maximum. At 4 per car, 44,000, which was the most anybody ever thought Disneyland could hold. They’d count how many were going into the park, measure this against ride capacity and Cast Members hired for the day, figure the maximum they could take, and then they’d do something very reasonable. They’d put a little sandwich sign out front saying “Parking Lot Full”. It was that easy. A sign that would cost about $14.00 from Home Depot lumber was the off switch that controlled every aspect of the park’s running for the day. Every dollar made, every smile, every single thing you did and how fast you did it depended on that little beat up sign. Because there was almost nowhere else to park. Even if you stayed in one of the many hotels in the area, and most didn’t, the shuttle service was spotty. If the Disneyland lot was full, you basically didn’t go in. That’s how they controlled overcrowding. And it worked just fine. Until they decided to get rid of the parking lot and build another park in its place. Nobody seems to have questioned building Disney's California Adventure when Paul Pressler and Barry Braverman proposed it to Michael Eisner in a meeting at Aspen. It would work. DCA would make some money, relieve Disneyland of the crowds and be the envy of the world. The new hotel there would be classy & expensive. There would be special rooms for Management, and it would provide corporate party (sorry, meeting) facilities, very important these days to Disney Inc. Then they built the damn thing and forgot to tell the Imagineers to use their imaginations. Think about it; almost no theme park on Earth has less imagination per square foot than Disney’s California Adventure. It’s not based on any imaginary land or experience because it's not supposed to; it’s based on California. Every part of it mimics a place in California. The idea was that tourists wouldn’t HAVE to visit northern redwoods, they could see them right here at DCA. You don’t have to visit the ocean, we’ll just build a big shallow swimming pool, call it an ocean, not let people go into the water on hot August days, and they’ll love it! Fuzzy thinking. They built it anyway. And believe it or not, nobody goes to Disney's California Adventure. 2006 Attendance Totals; Disney World - 16.64 Million Who cares? I’ll tell ya who – everybody who now has to put up with the massive, stifling, unendurable levels of overcrowding happening at Disneyland every day. The crowds are almost entirely due to Disney management overestimating by literally tens of millions the amount of people they thought would be going to DCA. They built a highway off-ramp to handle the estimated crowds. They built a new parking structure, the largest single parking building in North America. They built a hotel. They put in a long narrow shopping district, imported specialty stores from across the state, built restaurants, bars, teddy bear emporiums, And then nobody came. What the public does right now, and has done since DCA was built in 2001, is to use the new parking areas & hotel & highway ramps & shopping mall entrance as an even larger gateway to Disneyland. They simply ignore the existence of DCA and head over to DLand. And the “Parking Lot Full” sign is gone, because nowadays here’s your options - Mickey & Friends Parking Structure (10,242 cars) Yikes, Goofy! Next - the numbers. |