Amusing stat, but doesn't really speak to FL builds.

Why not? It's in Florida, and one way or another, Florida policymaking enabled mass transit where it made sense.

You probably don't like that it's a private company on private land, but that's irrelevant to the question of decarbonation.

You know there's a Disney park in California too, that has a monorail and shuttle services too?

So why not compare Disney to Disney and the metros to... well...

Was it a FL public project? That Disney, famously in "battle" with the FL government right now, did something commendable says little about what FL would do.

It say that Florida had regulations and land-use policies that allowed private enterprises to set up effective mass transit! That's a good thing that most states didn't do!

Not really. Florida effectively gave a large chunk of land to Disney. This has famously been covered in recent litigation and they tried to claw it back. Such that, no, I don't think you can take Disney's situation as at all indicative of something from the Florida land-use policies. Would be akin to financial advice from a lottery winner.

Unless you are saying maybe we should pursue more local governments run by a corporation? That also feels wrong, all told. Though, I would grant I don't have enough perspective there to know.

FL didn't give land to Disney. Disney bought all of its own land via W.E.D. Enterprises and other dummy companies they used to discretely make the purchases in 1964 [2]. Later, after Walt's death in 1965, in 1967, Roy O. Disney made the case for the Reedy Creek Improvement Act [1], which gave Disney an exclusive zone in the state independent of county/city/state zoning laws, building codes, school districts, etc.

Part of the pitch to getting the Reedy Creek Act passed, was the plans for E.P.C.O.T. (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) and the plan to build a new urban development. Those plans were complicated after Walt's death and permanently shelved after his brother Roy's retirement in 1968, but Disney retained its exemptions in spite of never truly undertaking the original plan and simply operated a tax-reduced, virtually regulation-free amusement park, until this year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Act [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140903204555/http://articles.o...

Right. "Give land" was used in a way that is a clearly meant more colloquially than any specific form. To the point of this thread, I am asserting that Disney acted far more independently in all things that they did than not. Such that counting it as a thing that the Florida government did well feels like a stretch.

At the least, it is far more complicated than makes sense, and can't really be used as evidence one way or the other for Florida making good choices.

How many people daily take the ferry that runs between the entrance of Small World and the exit? By expanding the definition of "mass transit" into meaninglessness, we might find that Florida really is a leader!

How many tourists take the subway from Chinatown to Fisherman's Wharf? None, because it doesn't exist.

There's only one definition of "mass transit" that matters and it's the one you know CA can't deliver on.

The sad thing is, I think if Walt Disney hadn't died when he did, the monorail system would have expanded throughout the city of Orlando and probably to other parts of the state.

His plans for EPCOT were originally to build an actual planned city using these technologies to manage traffic flow: https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/overview/the-...

The Disney world ridership numbers are from 2012, back then the daily ridership numbers for BART was well over 300,000 or more than twice that of Disney’s Monorail.

Your BART number is also in the middle of the Pandemic, back then the daily ridership of the Disney’s monorail was 0, as the park was closed.

Most resent number for BART is (Q4 2022) 146,500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit

I’m having difficulty finding ridership numbers for Disney’s monorail. The best I can give is 150,000 per day. https://www.tampabay.com/life-culture/2023/05/04/disney-desa... which is something some legislator says while playing politics.