E.P.C.O.T.

Part of being old is having the right to be a curmudgeon. It is the gift we receive as the hands of time take everything else. Another part of being old is having the wisdom to know when you are just being a curmudgeon for no good reason.

WayneWho is against the Destiny Housing Development. No matter how many angry e-mails we get from 'Green' consultants, we are not going to change our minds that 40,000 more homes will ever be good for Osceola County if the jobs and a great infrastructure is not put in place. Putting some fancy 'Green' spin on the sales brochure for another tract-home development is not building the community of tomorrow, it is building the next BVL. No offense to our neighbors in BVL, but the county let the developers who built your community put one over on you big time. This is the same thing we see with Destiny. While we are very intrigued by the promise of green technologies, we know snake-oil when someone is trying to sell it.

WayneWho was against Light Rail. While we still continue to talk about the need for it, we have to admit that Paula Dockery was right. It was a bad deal on a transportation system that was anything but mass transit. It was a single thread of movement that would have fallen victim to ridership woes because local governments would have continued to cut the funding for the bus lines that were needed to feed the system with riders. For the burden of the price tag Central Florida was about to get stuck with, it did not make sense.

So as curmudgeons, we were about to just give up on the whole concept of our communities getting their collective acts together enough to ever really compete in the future. We were on the verge of making a pitch for returning the whole area to farm land.

As we were debating the issue, one of our staff was reading a letter to the editor in the Orlando Sentinel from a Frederick Hart of Orlando. His letter titled "Disney World is epitome of quality transportation" talks about a presentation Walt Disney gave to legislators and the public outlining his plan for the Experimental Prototypical Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). Mr. Hart writes, "His boulevards include mass transportation in the forms of raised monorails and magnetic-levitation trains as well as covered pedestrian walkways to protect people from the harsh Central Florida sun. Unfortunately his vision for an EPCOT died with him. All we got was a theme park." Brilliant words.

We have received some e-mails with these ideas before, but being of the 'Curmudgeon Clan' we never really gave it much thought. We decided to use 'the Google' to see if such a plan existed. Sure enough we found several essays on Disney's plans for his "Progress City" as it was originally called. From the essays, you can easily see that Walt Disney's true beliefs, as highlighted in his projects in Florida, were the expanding corporate control over democratic rule. We have to wonder what Walt's feelings would be on the complete corporate meltdowns we have seen over the past couple of years. Maybe there are still some advantages to Democracy.

Regardless of his political views, we have to wonder if it is not time to drag some of his ideas, for the real version of EPCOT, out of mothballs. Instead of creating a public-private partnership with CSX, why not do it with Disney. They already have working mass transportation systems that are included for the price of a visitor's ticket, and they seem to be able to do it without cars backing up at railroad crossing gates. While monorails and other people movers may not be the taste of today, maybe there are some concepts in the original EPCOT plans that can be used. If not, we assume that a whole team of 'Imagineers' might be able to figure something out.

One thing that is clear from the research is that after spending a good amount of time in Los Angeles, Walt Disney had realized something that our local politicians are just now figuring out. The auto-oriented transformation of our major cities were problems, not successes. His goal was to find ways to put cars in their place and pedestrians back into the plan. While not all of his transportation plans have come to fruition in the theme parks, the designers have come extremely close. Judging by the economic success of the parks, it is hard to argue they are wrong. The sad part is that the Central Florida communities, whose fates are most intertwined with the Disney Projects, have no real public transportation systems. Basically if you want to get to Disney, you have to drive. The best public transportation systems in Florida are just amusement park rides. We find this sad because Disney's 14-miles of a monorail system that carries a reported 80,000 passengers per day, is said to be one the most extensive mass transportation systems in the world. All this right next door to communities that are shutting down bus routes.

While not one of the WayneWho staff are Disneyatics, we understand the concept of hiring a consultant that can offer real world advice based on real world accomplishments. It just does not make sense to us to have the guy from the 'Subway Sandwich' company plan a city of 'tomorrow' when we already have one right next door that is already functioning. We are also fully aware that many of the ideas and concepts that could be the most useful to our local communities died with Walt, but like we said, there must be something that could be dusted off and given a second look. The issue is that you can not build an eco-sustainable city if you have cars driving in and out of it every day. Since 'Destiny' can not show us they can create all of the jobs needed to keep the community self-contained, more cars on the roads are going to be the end result. Osceola can't take care of the roads it has now, even though they are spending a 'record' amount of money on them. Something has to give.

We hope you made it this far in our 'Jay Wheeler' sounding tirade and that you enjoyed it for what it is. This is just a call for our communities to keep thinking about transportation. The death of light rail seems to have caused many to just give up and walk away. We find this sad, because the idea behind light rail actually had found unprecedented support from multiple counties that were actually working together instead of fighting. What failed were the shaky business dealings and sneaky changes that were behind the plan. That's all. Central Florida residents are still in favor of some type of mass transportation system and want some relief from the nightmare known as I-4. It is either that or we start planting orange trees again.

Maybe it is time we go talk to the Mouse.

Source:
The Original Epcot