One reason why Disney is able to run such an efficient transit system is that it has a huge number of visitors in a small geographic area of just a few miles. By contrast, real public transit systems that get similar annual ridership as Disney cover much larger areas, and, as a result, incur much higher costs to move similar numbers of people.
In the case of Disney, the big tradeoff for having a small geographical area is that its transit service doesn't actually reach the Orlando airport, where most of the guests are coming from. Instead, a Google search for "how to get to disney world from airport" says to either rent a car, take Uber, or ride the real public transit. And, for guests that arrive from places within driving distances, Disney takes the approach of building huge parking garages at its resorts, rather than stretching its transit system thin to get closer to where people are actually coming from.
If real public transit agencies were run like Disney World, I think the analogy would be concentrate an entire city's transit resources on just a couple of square miles near downtown, build huge parking garages at the edge of the downtown with direct access to the transit system, and expect everyone to drive a car or pay for an Uber to go to or from anywhere else. For Disney, this approaches makes a lot of sense - like the article says, the aim is to make it easy and convenient to travel within the resort, not easy and convenient to leave. But, you couldn't get away with trying to run a big-city public transit system like that.
One reason why Disney is able to run such an efficient transit system is that it has a huge number of visitors in a small geographic area of just a few miles. By contrast, real public transit systems that get similar annual ridership as Disney cover much larger areas, and, as a result, incur much higher costs to move similar numbers of people.
In the case of Disney, the big tradeoff for having a small geographical area is that its transit service doesn't actually reach the Orlando airport, where most of the guests are coming from. Instead, a Google search for "how to get to disney world from airport" says to either rent a car, take Uber, or ride the real public transit. And, for guests that arrive from places within driving distances, Disney takes the approach of building huge parking garages at its resorts, rather than stretching its transit system thin to get closer to where people are actually coming from.
If real public transit agencies were run like Disney World, I think the analogy would be concentrate an entire city's transit resources on just a couple of square miles near downtown, build huge parking garages at the edge of the downtown with direct access to the transit system, and expect everyone to drive a car or pay for an Uber to go to or from anywhere else. For Disney, this approaches makes a lot of sense - like the article says, the aim is to make it easy and convenient to travel within the resort, not easy and convenient to leave. But, you couldn't get away with trying to run a big-city public transit system like that.