North American Subways

These are all the subways of North America connected. How beautiful.

Most Efficient Mass Transit Systems in the United States

1. New York City Subway

• 468 stations
• 24 lines
• 37,600 riders per mile

2. Washington D.C. Metro

• 86 stations
• 5 lines
• 9,000 riders per mile

3. Chicago L

• 145 stations
• 8 lines
• 7,000 riders per mile

4. Boston MBTA

• 119 stations
• 4 lines
• 15,000 riders per mile

5. San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit

• 44 stations
• 5 lines
• 9,000 riders per mile

New York City Subway of the Future

Someday, the NYC transit system will collapse and there will be a desperate cry for a solution.

Future New York Subway:

Since the 1990s NYC subway ridership has grown rapidly:

Millions of commuters are traveling on the subways through 100 year old tunnels every day. The platforms are crowded as they were never meant to hold so much traffic.

Someday there will be a need for a new system.

My proposal is that the city, or even better a private company construction rights, should build a new super system underneath the old New York City system.

The ground under New York is hard rock called schist, and allows for deep tunneling.

The new system would be an express system, and the old system would be a local system.

Where would the subway go? Not to all 500 stations, but only the most important ones.

This is a map of the ridership at each station. The larger the red circle, the more riders.

This is a map idea with two lines, labeled colors Red and Blue for right now:

These lines provide a connection to New Jersey and also JFK.

The system will have clean stations and with large capacity, along with subway trains at move at 80 mph between stops and have large capacity.

Someday, everyone will expect the subways to run on time, and a new system will help move New York into a future of more innovation and productivity. 

Italy Has Cutting Edge High Speed Rail Technology and Competition

Even though Italy is a socialist country, there are two large high speed rail companies competing, one is called Frecciarossa, and the other is Italo, created by the CEO of Ferrari.

Italo is Europe's first private high speed rail company. In 2003, Italy passed a law that ended the government train monopoly. Four businessmen, including the CEO of Ferrari, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, started the Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori company and opened service in 2012.

The Italo runs on the Italian government owned rails, and has to pay $156 million per year in order to use the government infrastructure.

America has no competition like this for railroads. The American government took over the failing railroad industries in the 1950s and now there is a government railroad monopoly.

With the problems of efficiency in rail systems like the New York city subway, why isn't and anyone talking about privatizing the operation of the system?

There plenty of problems with Amtrak and the New York City subway, both could be much more efficient and cost effective, without a government monopoly or expensive workers unions.

Where would you build a new Disney Park larger than Disney World?

If you had unlimited funds, political capital, and plenty of customer demand?

I would build it here:

On a man made island off the coast of Florida or Bahamas

Kind of like Dubai, but it would be less like a city:

I love Disney World but sometimes I dream of creating an even better version of what Disney World does perfectly, just as Walt Disney himself learned from his first project Disneyland and made Disney World Florida even better.

In the next 50 years, if there is growing United States and World economy, and all Disney Parks in North America are maxed out, where would you build a new Disney World?

I'll call it Disney Universe just for now.

Dubai planned to build something like this a few years ago called Dubailand.

The model looks amazing, however it still looks too much like Six Flags or a carnival, and not as special or as magical as Disney. This plan is still going on in Dubai but after the world financial crisis in the late 2000s the project is developing at a much slower pace.

However, to build a new Disney Universe you would need these things:

1. Lots of land: Disney World is enormous and this would need to be even bigger. There needs to be plenty of room to create distance from civilization and space for dozens of hotels, large parks, parking lots, and other transportation services.
2. Lots of water: every Disney park has lots of rivers, waterfalls, fountains, canals, lakes, man made lakes, and pools. Water makes places magical. It allows for beautiful views, refreshment and it makes everything visually appealing.
3. Tropical climate or warm
4. Connection to airport or transportation service to large urban center.

Different options to build new Disney parks, Refer to map above.

Red circle California or Arizona:

• This is what it would look like, it would be a paradise in the desert, and water would have to be transported in to make not such a dry climate.
• However, there would be easy connection to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Diego

Orange circle Texas

• Texas would be too dry, and too windy to be a Disney park paradise.
• Also there is not enough water

Yellow circle Tropical Islands

• This would be my favorite place to build a Disney paradise
• It would be on a man made island
• The island would have to be huge and expensive to build
• There would be perfect climate, except for hurricanes
• Beautiful beaches, views, water everywhere
• This is what I would choose

Green and Blue circles:

• Louisiana would be too swampy and not enough good land
• Central America would be too controversial and far away from the United States

World Transportation System

If you had unlimited financial power to create a transportation system around the world, what cities would you connect?

Many have proposed Vactrain technology, which is a maglev train that travels through a vacuum tunnel with no air resistance. The vacuum allows the train to go as fast as possible, with enough gradual acceleration to not discomfort riders.

Although incredibly fast (New York to Hollywood in 45 minutes, or New York to London in one hour,) a project to create vacuum tunnels around the world and cost so much money, dozens of trillions of dollars, and it will probably never happen before some sort of space travel is widely used.

However, this is what is could look like:

The most important cities in the world are not necessarily the most populated.

It would not make sense to connect cities like Jakarta or Mumbai even though they are in the top 5 since these cities have developing economies.

A better way to tell what the most important cities for transportation is the Global Cities ranking.

These cities are more important to the global economy and ranked according to according to a hierarchy of importance to the operation of the global system of finance and trade.

Here are maps that have a system connecting the top 8 global cities:

I also added in Dubai.

Travel time would be extremely shorter than air travel, and would connect the global economy in a revolutionary way. 

New York to London 1 hour

New York to Chicago 30 minutes

Chicago to Los Angeles 1 hour

Los Angeles to Tokyo 90 minutes

We have the technology to do this, but probably not enough financial capital.

Dream High Speed Rail Northeast Corridor

Amtrak Acela Express is not true high speed rail.

• The top speed is 150mph and it only reaches this speed a few times on the Northeast Corridor. 
• The average speed between Boston and Washington D.C. is slightly under 70mph, which is very slow compared to high speed rail around the world.

• New high speed rail lines in China are much faster:
• The average speed on the route between Wuhan and Guangzhou is 194mph and cut the 600 mile trip from 10 hours by rail to 3 hours:

On the Beijing-Tianjin intercity rail, 85% of the track is on viaducts, which allow for a smooth route and high speeds to go on:

The Northeast Corridor tracks are overused and old. The tracks have many curves which permit the acela express from traveling much faster.

This is what the route should look like:

There can be 2 levels of service, an express and local.
         
            Express: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C.
            Local: Boston, Hartford, Stamford, New York, Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore,                                        BWI and Washington D.C.

• There would be viaducts built on new tracks on a new route to allow for high speeds between Boston and Washington D.C.
• The travel time could be 90 minutes from Boston to New York
• And 90 minutes from New York to Washington D.C.

This is another route that goes over Long Island:

True high speed rail in the Northeast would require new tracks and new viaducts to allow for fast speeds.

The Northeast Corridor is 450 miles long, and trains that would have an average speed of over 100mph instead of the disappointing 70mph for acela would cut the time between Boston and Washington D.C. significantly.

New Disney Monorail Design

WDW needs to bring back the monorail. Every guest at a Disney World hotel wants to feel the exhilaration of riding the monorail to the parks, rather than the mundane bus system.

The goal is to make the commute from hotels to parks:

          1. more enjoyable than the bus system

          2. more efficient and faster than the bus system

My design:

Quick Facts:

• This design has 4 monorail lines that connect almost every hotel to the parks in one transfer or less.
• One monorail line travels along the existing loop around the Seven Seas Lagoon.
• Unfortunately, the Epcot loop around Future World was taken out in order to provide efficient connections to other parks and hotels.
• The goal is to connect the major hotels to the parks in a 20 minute commute or less.
• The colors are not ideal, but are red, orange, green, and blue in order to differentiate the routes.

Overview:

• Each monorail line runs on a closed circuit (For example: monorails on red monorail line do not run on blue monorail line). This is to prevent the potential danger and inefficiency of switching beams.

• Each monorail line has its own maintenance facility/train yard at the end of the lines.

• Each monorail line would have its own method of turning around, either on a loop behind the station after the last stop, or switching tracks and going back into service in opposite direction, similar to how some NYC subways turn around at the end of lines.

• Monorail lines would use advanced technology to be able to run safely at at least 60 mph between stops, especially on the long stretch between Epcot and the TTS. 

• The loading and unloading process would be revised in order to maximize efficiency and safety. For example, today on the WDW monorail the resort monorail takes 18 minutes to ride around, while spending 60-90 seconds at each station. That is inefficient for this model, since the goal is to be more efficient than the bus system. This is a difficult problem to solve, since families with small children take their time when loading and unloading with strollers.

1. Red

          Connects Magic Kingdom and the Transportation and Ticket Center to Magic Kingdom Resorts.

2. Orange

          Connects All-Star Resorts, Caribbean Beach Resort, Pop Century, and Art of Animation Resort              to Boardwalk/Epcot Resorts, Boardwalk, Hollywood Studios, and Epcot.

3. Green

          Connects Magic Kingdom and TTS to Epcot, Port Orleans Resorts, Saratoga Springs Resort, and           Downtown Disney, also allowing option for extension of route towards Orlando for easier                     access.

4. Blue

          Connects Magic Kingdom and TTS to Boardwalk/Epcot Resorts, Hollywood Studios, Blizzard             Beach, Animal Kingdom, and Animal Kingdom Lodge.

Analysis of Monorail stops:

There are 20 Resorts at WDW resort (not including villas, and including Swan and Dolphin)

• There are 6 Parks at WDW (4 theme parks and 2 water parks)
• Also a connection is necessary to Downtown Disney and Transportation and Ticket Center
• This would call for 28 stops.
• Instead of trying to connect every single hotel, I organized the hotels into groups that would be served by only one monorail stop.

Also, not every hotel was chosen to have a monorail connection.

List of Hotel Groups

from most rooms to least rooms:

M = would have monorail connection in my design

• All-Star Resorts (6,000 rooms) M
• All-Star Movies 1,920 rooms
• All-Star Music 1,604 rooms
• All-Star Sports 1,920 rooms

• Epcot Resorts (5,000 rooms) M
• Boardwalk Inn 378 rooms
• Boardwalk Villas 583 rooms
• Yacht Club 621 rooms
• Beach Club 576 rooms
• Beach Club Villas 282 rooms
• Swan 756  rooms
• Dolphin 1,509 rooms

• Art of Animation and Pop Century Resorts (5,000 rooms) M
• Art of Animation 1,984 rooms
• Pop Century 2,880 rooms

• Magic Kingdom Resorts (4,000 rooms) M
• Contemporary 655 rooms
• Bay Lake Tower 428 rooms
• Polynesian 847 rooms
• Grand Floridian 867 rooms
• Grand Floridian Villas 147 rooms
• Wilderness Lodge 729 rooms
• Wilderness Lodge Villas 136 rooms

• Port Orleans Resorts (3,000 rooms) M
• Port Orleans Riverside 2,048
• Port Orleans French Quarter 1,008

• Caribbean Beach (2,000 rooms) M
• Caribbean Beach Resort 2,112 rooms

• Coronado Springs (2,000 rooms)
• Coronado Springs 1,915 rooms

• Animal Kingdom Lodge Resort (2,000 rooms) M
• Animal Kingdom Lodge 1,307
• Animal Kingdom Lodge Villas 458

• Fort Wilderness Resort (1,200 rooms)
• Fort Wilderness Campground 1,197 rooms

• Old Key West (1,000 rooms)
• Old Key West Villas 761 rooms

There is no connection to Old Key West, Fort Wilderness Resort, Coronado Springs, or Typhoon Lagoon, since connecting the monorail to these hotels would be too far out of the monorail routes.

This is a track map that shows the separation between each of the monorail tracks.


Route Times:

Red Line from Magic Kingdom:
1. Magic Kingdom               0 min
2. Contemporary Resort       2 min
3. TTS                                  4 min
4. Polynesian Resort             6 min
5. Grand Floridian Resort     8 min
6. Magic Kingdom              10 min

This red line route today takes about 18 min around the loop. This time could be shortened to 10 min if each train only spent 60 seconds at each station and the monorails traveled faster in between stations.

Blue Line from Magic Kingdom:

1. Magic Kingdom                    0 min
2. TTS                                       2 min
3. Epcot Resorts / Boardwalk    7 min
4. Hollywood Studios                9 min
5. Blizzard Beach                    12 min
6. Animal Kingdom                 15 min
7. Animal Kingdom Lodge      18 min

Green Line from Magic Kingdom:

1. Magic Kingdom                    0 min
2. TTS                                       2 min
3. Epcot                                     8 min
4. Port Orleans Resorts             11 min
5. Saratoga Springs Resort       13 min
6. Downtown Disney               15 min
7. 1-4 or Orlando connection   20 min


Orange Line from All-Star Resorts:

1. All-Star Movies                            0 min
2. All-Star Music                              2 min
3. All-Star Sports                              6 min
4. Hollywood Studios                     10 min
5. Epcot Resorts/ Boardwalk          12 min
6. Epcot                                          14 min
7. Caribbean Beach                        17 min
8. Art of Animation/Pop Century   20 min
9. Parking Lot                                22 min


Monorails during the morning rush hour would run every 4-5 minutes, and every 2 minutes near the closing of the parks. At Epcot, the monorail only runs every 10 minutes around 9:30pm when the World Showcase Fireworks Show is finished. As a result of this there are long lines at the Epcot station since trains arrive so rarely. With a new monorail train schedule, the system could accommodate the excess guests traveling to the parks in the morning and excess guests traveling to the hotels after park closings.

Conclusion

This would no doubt be an expensive project for Disney World to undertake, however it would be worth the cost. This project goes along with the ideas of Walt Disney himself. A new monorail system like this would be an attraction in itself, and would keep guests wanting to come back year after year. The man Walt Disney had dreams of a comprehensive transportation system like this one, he would be disappointed with the current bus system that is inefficient and slow. Please Walt Disney World, expand the monorail. Everyone loves it.