When designing a transit system,
one of the most difficult and important tasks is to determine the best location
for stations. At Walt Disney World, this process is easier than normal because
nearly all of the possible station locations are owned by Disney. This does not
mean that there are no difficult choices to make when designing the route, but
it does remove many of the political complications that conventional transit
planning encounters.
To plan a fully-realized
monorail system for Walt Disney World, I still had to create some baseline data
to evaluate possible configurations. This process forced me to formalize my
decisions, so I will describe them here in case somebody cares to comment or
disagree[i].
I created a scoring system that
will be used as a way to score different routes in a consistent manner. This
scoring system uses three equally-weighted variables: number of rooms, room
rates and convenience.
Number of rooms implies the
number of guests who could possibly use the monorail. The source I used to
calculate the number of rooms is the excellent resource, The Unofficial Guide to Walt
Disney World 2013[ii].
Unfortunately, my inputs do not include more recent additions such as the Grand
Floridian Villas or the upcoming Polynesian expansion.
Room rate is the bottom of the
range reported as the rack room rate in the 2013 Unofficial Guide[iii].
The bottom of the range was chosen because the existence of the monorail would
need to be justified even during the slower season when room rates are the
cheapest. Where one station would serve two hotels with different rates, a
weighted average price was used. For instance, the Wilderness Lodge station
serves Wilderness Lodge (727 rooms at $265) and the Wilderness Lodge Villas (136
rooms at $355). The weighted room rate is calculated by multiplying the room rate
by the number of rooms and divided by the combined number of rooms.
Convenience is a subjective
rating on a score of 1 to 3 that describes how well the resort hotel is configured
for a monorail station to increase the value of the hotel. For instance the
Boardwalk resort is located on a relatively compact site, with even the
furthest rooms a comfortable walking distance away. Hotels with a convenience
score of 3 have the potential for conveniently-located monorail stations. The
All-Star Resorts have a convenience score of 1 because the buildings furthest
from the center are a long walk across grounds and parking lot. If a monorail
station was built here, only some of the guests would find it an improvement
over the existing bus system (which uses multiple stops).
The overall score is a
combination of the three equally-weighted variables[iv].
Note how the three resorts with existing monorail stations are the first, third
and sixth-highest rated resorts. This may mean that my scoring system is
somewhat reasonable because it does not give low scores to the existing
monorail resorts.
What do you think? Are my Convenience
scores reasonable? Is there a problem with my methodology? Next time I will
arrange these hotels into several possible routes and compare the total score
to the length of each possible line.
[i] I
am creating this project in such a way that I can change the variables fairly
easy to allow me to evaluate different combinations.
[ii] Sehlinger,
B., & Testa, L. (2013). The unofficial guide to Walt Disney World 2013.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Official Website. The number
of rooms are from the Disney Resort Amenities table on pp. 124.
[iii] Cost
Per Night of Disney Resort Hotel Rooms (Rack Rate) table on pp. 114
[iv]
If the most expensive hotel also had the most rooms and had a convenience score
of 3, it would score 100. The overall score was calculated as follows: Overall
Score = ([Number of Rooms] / [largest Number of Rooms] * 33.3) + ([Room Rate] /
[highest Room Rate] * 33.3) + ([Convenience Score] / [highest Convenience
Score] * 33.3)
