[OKC] From Slate: The future of urban transportation looks a lot like the past.

[Miles, Karen]

Streetcars vs. Monorails


The future of urban transportation looks a lot like the past.

By Tom Vanderbilt
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011, at 4:19 PM ET 
________________________________

There is a great, if unnamed and often overlooked, attraction in Disney
World: Transportationland. 
As any visitor knows, one of the most striking experiences at Disney
World is navigating it. The place offers an impressively multi-modal
suite of options. There's walking, horseless carriages, steamboats, the
famous monorail (said to carry more passengers than most U.S. light-rail
systems), horse-drawn trolleys, the Tomorrowland Transit Authority
PeopleMover, not to mention mobility scooters and, at some parks, bikes.
Then there's the bus fleet that shuttles visitors from the parking lots
to the entrance gates. (If it were a municipal fleet, a Disney engineer
once told me, it would be the 21st largest in the United States.)
Transportation was, in fact, so important to Walt Disney himself that it
has come up in recent criticisms of Disney's newish California Adventure
park, built in 2001. "Disney obsessives
<http://redskydisney.blogspot.com/2009/01/california-adventure-railroad.
html>  complain the park is "missing a soul ... missing that signature
Disney theme park transportation." Indeed the park, which Disney's own
Robert Iger has called "mediocre," is undergoing a billion-dollar
renovation, featuring, among other things, the installation of a "Red
Car" trolley-an effort to inject a bit of street life into a "California
Adventure" that seemed, well, a little too contemporary Orange County. 
What's interesting about Disney World and Disneyland is not merely the
range of transportation options, but the mixture of new and old modes
they represent. These varied ways to get around reflect biographer Neal
Gabler's observation that Walt Disney
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679757473?ie=UTF8&tag=ellentacom-20&l
inkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0679757473>  was "at
once a nostalgist and a futurist, a conservative and visionary." One
imagines he would have been equally happy riding the retro trolley on
Main Street as whisking through Tomorrowland in an ultramodern monorail.
But there is something else to note here.... 
Article continues at URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2280972/
 
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