Coyote Blog

The other day I got stuck in Orlando for a day and took the opportunity to sit it out at DisneyWorld.  Despite being essentially a walk-up guest, the hotel upgraded me to a beautiful room looking out at the Magic Kingdom and the lake in front of it.

The Magic Kingdom is an interesting public transit case.  It is located miles away, across a lake, from its parking lot and can be quite a distance from many of the Disney hotels.  So most everyone comes to the Magic Kingdom in some sort of mass transit.

The most eye catching is the DisneyWorld monorail.  This version, designed in the late 1980's but fairly similar in outline to the original early-70's version, is clearly beautiful.  When I talk about industrial design, I often use a scale where 1 is the Boston City Hall and 10 is the Disneyworld monorail.  Not only are the trains themselves beautiful, but the spindly monorail beams are clearly better looking than most any other overhead rail arrangement.

But what makes for a good theme park ride does not necessarily make for good public transportation.  Here is why:

1. Monorails like this give up all the efficiency of trains.  Rail is efficient because the rolling friction of a flanged metal wheel on a metal rail is so much lower than, say, a tire on concrete.  But these monorails and most others ride on tires -- there is rolling friction of the tires on the top of the concrete beam as well as with the tires that stabilize the train on the sides of the beam.  These monorails are basically long busses up on a rail.
2. Monorails have lower capacity per car than trains.  For stability reasons on the narrow beam, monorails must be shorter and narrower than most rail trains (even given the world's too-narrow rail gauge standard).  This means for roughly the same car length and weight, they carry fewer passengers.
3. Monorails have the same downsides of trains.  They have capacity restrictions -- specifically they need much longer headways between trains for safety than busses do on the road.  And they are inflexible -- once you spend billions of dollars to put them on one route they are going to stay on that route.

As I sat on the lake, I could see all three modes of transit that Disney uses at the Magic Kingdom.  Both monorails and high capacity double-deck ferries run from the parking lot to the park, and busses run from most of the hotels to a bus depot at the park.  I could be wrong because it was not scientific, but I believe that the ferry boats had a lot more capacity per hour than the monorails -- particularly since Disney had to lengthen the distance between trains several years ago after an accident (yes, they actually have a single loop of track with no switching a couple of miles long and with perfect visibility ahead and they actually had a collision).

More telling is the fact that Disney has essentially abandoned the monorail for all its future expansions.  Yes, they built one to Epcot, but they have reduced service to one every 15 minutes or so and it brings in an absolutely trivial portion of the guests.  With its growing network of parks and hotels and all the possible point to point destination pairs, it relies on busses now almost exclusively for internal transport.

This is a really niche post, but I had a good experience last week running and wanted to share.   First, I have never been a fast runner.  Generally I can get into a steady pace, though, and keep turning miles.  Even when I was much younger, at 40 (about 15 years ago) I tended to run half-marathons (13.1 miles) in about 11 minutes per mile (which for the uninitiated is slllooowww).  Since that time, as I have aged and I have developed mild arthritis in my knees, my times have suffered.

I was always too snooty to try run walk run.  Even if I was slow, I took pride in just being able to keep running for 2-1/2 (or 5 for a marathon) hours continuously.  However, I noticed a while back that even a brief stop, say walking through a water station in a race, really provided a lot of recovery to my sore joints.  So for the last 2 months I have been training with run-walk-run.   After some experimentation, I created a pattern of 2:40 running followed by 1:00 walking.  I don't have to stare at a clock, I have an app (there are zillions of them) on my phone that once programmed with the time just tells me in my ear over my music when to start running and when to start walking.

At first, I did not expect a lot of improvement, probably because I didn't understand how jogging along and then walking could be faster.  But the point is that even a one minute walk is very refreshing and I tend to burst out of each walk with new energy and run the next section much faster than my usual jogging pace.   The theory is then that -- for running pace R > jogging pace J > Walking pace W -- R+W combined will be faster than all J.  And this certainly turned out to be the case for me.  Last weekend I ran in the Disney Princess Half Marathon (this is my favorite race and my daughter and I started running it years ago) and finished at a pace just a hair behind where I was 15 years ago, a full 2 minutes per mile faster than I was running before doing run-walk-run.

The one downside is that this can be tremendously irritating to other runners, particularly on a crowded course.  Races group people into start corrals by time, so that everyone in a certain part of the racecourse should theoretically be running about the same pace and not bumping into each other.  Run-walk-run folks screw this up.  But at this point, so many people are doing run-walk-run that I no longer feel a lot of guilt.

By the way, we generally run the Disney races in costume, so I used my Ironman running costume I did for the Marvel race and added a fetching matching tutu.  Here I am running through the Magic Kingdom.  The tutu is a little worse for wear by mile 6.

One of the excuses statists often use to promote government over private enterprise is that businesses are "short-term focused".  They are only after "profit in the next quarter."  They don't "invest for the long-term" like a government can.  Really?

Iran's oil exports are plummeting at 10pc a year on lack of
investment and could be exhausted within a decade, depriving the world
economy of its second-biggest source of crude supplies.

A report by the US National Academy of Sciences said rickety
infrastructure dating back to the era of the Shah had crippled output,
while local fuel use was rising at 6pc a year.

"Their domestic demand is growing at the highest rate of any country
in the world," said Prof Roger Stern, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore.

"They need to invest $2.5bn (£1.28bn) a year just to stand still
and they're not doing it because it's politically easier to spend the
money on social welfare and the army than to wait four to six years for
a return on investment," he said.

"They've been running down the industry like this for 20 years."

You never hear this problem in the privately run oil industry.  And I can say with complete confidence that this is a government problem, not just an Iran problem. 

Take one area in this country I know about, public recreation.   The BLM, the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Corps of Engineers (not to mention state, county and local authorities) all run thousands of recreation facilities across the country.  And I can tell you that no public entity I know of budgets or spends adequate money on preventative and routine maintenance.  The nature of the process is that Congressmen love to get their name attached to building a new government recreation facility - that's sexy.  But then they never appropriate enough money to keep it maintained.  In their calculus, politicians can get a lot more political mileage from spending money in year 2 on another flashy announcement of a new facility than they can from spending that money to maintain the facilities they funded in year 1.

Can you imagine someone like Disney doing this?  Of course not.  The Magic Kingdom at DisneyWorld, the oldest of the them parks there, looks as fresh and new and well-kept when you visit it as does the newer MGM and Animal Kingdom parks.

And don't even get me started on government pensions and Social Security.  Oops, too late, I am started.  Yes, a few private companies in steel and airlines have under-funded pensions (though the government is partially to blame there) but by the definition of "under-funded" that private companies use, nearly every single public pension fund in the country is under-funded.  That is because most public pensions do not actually put away any money (zero, zip) for future liabilities -- they simply pay this year's required payments out of this year's funds.  States and municipalities have a huge balloon pension burden coming -- just wait twenty years and we will all be talking about it.  And Social Security, for all the smoke and mirrors, effectively works the same way, since current premiums in excess of current obligations are spent on the feds general obligations (if you still think there is some trust fund out there, wake up.)

For a while now, I have meant to publish a guide to Walt Disney World (WDW).  For a variety of reasons related to a recurring family reunion, I have spent at least 50 days at WDW in 10 trips over 25 years.  Over those years, I have learned a fair amount about surviving WDW.  Since we may not be going back for a while (the crowds are just too crazy, see below) I thought I would
share some of my experience.  My thoughts, review, and tips on Disney World are below the fold.

Note:  I have made updates in blue from my October, 2008 trip.

Continue reading ‘Disney World Reviews and Advice’ »