Some thoughts on a visit to Disneyland:

Traffic Control. Disneyland and Walmart share a factor in their success: the marriage of a great idea with great execution… and a fiercely efficient processing system. Walmart in storing, tracking and moving merchandise, and Disneyland in crowd control. Grandma and Grandpa took the family to Disneyland today, and the people management is striking.

Over the last thirty years (my conscious memory history of Disneyland), the numbers of people coming through the park has increased vastly. When I was a child, waiting time for the popular rides (E-ticket rides) was sometimes as much as 30 minutes in the summer peak season, Today, waits exceed 90 minutes on a busy day. That’s a really long time to spend standing in line. At an average 1 hour per ride, you might only get on 10 or 12 rides in a very long and exhausting day, with no stops for meals or parades.

(Today was a weekday in off-season, albeit a sunny warm day before the December holidays, so not the quietest day of the year, but pretty close. Waits were about 15-25 minutes for the popular rides, although one brand new ride — the refurbished submarine ride, now Nemo-branded — had a wait of over an hour.)

It occurs to me that with the numbers of people coming through, it may make sense to let lines accumulate a little. It provides a holding zone for large quantities of people at any given time, easing traffic pressure in the open areas. (Those open areas, incidentally, are at capacity now, even on a quiet day like today, so getting people off the street must be critical.)

Disneyland made a lot of investment about 10 years ago in waiting zone design. Rides of that era (StarTours, Indiana Jones, the refurbished Autopia, even Big Thunder Mountain) have well-designed lines with video entertainment, animated mannequins (animatronics), and themed architecture/landscaping. It’s a notable contrast to the rides installed 20+ years ago (Space Mountain, Small World, Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted House), where you just plain wait in line.

Changes I’ve noticed in 30 years:

• Striking continued use of old technologies, mostly successfully, although not always (Small World is falling to pieces, and the dioramas of the Grand Canyon seen from the Railroad are shabbier than ever).
• Conversion of the old parking lot to a new (and mostly unvisited) theme park a couple of years ago means that parking is now in a dull and depressing concrete structure. Welcome to Disneyland! Please pony up $11 parking. It just doesn’t have the excitement of the old system, where you saw flags and banners waving, the monorail overhead and Cinderella’s castle in the distance drawing you in. Now you see a parking structure like the one at the mall, only bigger.

• Fast Pass
• Lines extending outside the buildings
• Signs informing of wait times
• Cross-branding of rides (Astroid Blaster, Nemo submarine, Indiana Jones)
• Less brilliant use of color in landscaping
• Less-clean bathrooms
• Fewer Disney characters on the street
• Dull paint on garbage cans
• No visible street cleaning staff
• Noticeable wear and tear on paint and cementwork
• Toontown and concert stage — both generally shunned, in part because of their awful location in the farthest corner of the park, with a single entrance/exit to the area.

Do these changes and deterioration reflect a cutback on the very high maintenance standards?

Overall, for the first time in all my visits to Disneyland, I felt a definite dullness of the patina, a lack of the brilliance and shine of the experience. It’s a pity.

Update, Dec. 22, 2007:

It seems as though the people on the outside of the Disneyland parking lot aren’t too happy about it, either.