The Monorail Project - Stations

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.

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[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)