Disneyland Tokyo and the Single Rider Line

When Radiator Springs Racers opened at Disney’s California Adventure it was a total boon for my niece and me. Rather than the rope drop crowd of hundreds stampeding to Toy Story Mania with us, they were making a beeline into Cars Land, leaving us to a relatively line-free first three trips through the Toy Story midway. The line for Radiator Springs would suck people up all day, keeping them in line and away from other rides.

180 minutes. A good day for Toy Story Mania.

When lines get that long, park visitors often hop into the single rider’s line. This line allows cast members loading the ride to make sure every car goes out at full capacity. So Radiator Springs Racers with its 3-seat-per-row configuration often accommodated a family of 4 (in 2 rows of 2) and 2 single riders, one per row. Awesome. If you didn’t mind sitting with another group you could significantly cut your time in line, and plenty of people – particularly teenagers – did just that, hanging out in the single rider line with their friends, riding with strangers, and regrouping at the end of the ride to go their merry way.

1/3 the wait. All of the fun. 

When I was at Disneyland Tokyo on Halloween this year they sold out of tickets by noon. It was THAT crowded. I headed towards Splash Mountain because it’s always a hoot to hear Zippity Doo Dah in Japanese. The line was 150 minutes long. Fortunately, there was a single rider line so I headed down.

Here is the single rider line at Splash Mountain, just before boarding:

Don’t see it? Right. Too dark.  Here it is lightened up, and I’ll point out the line with an arrow.

Still don’t see it? Oh, right that’s because there ISN’T anyone waiting. Not a SINGLE PERSON. That guy at the end, that's a cast member. With an over two-hour wait, no one wants to ride alone in Japan, and no one wants to ride with strangers. You ride with the friends you came with, or you don’t ride at all. It’s kind of a wonderful sentiment.

And if you look at the ride photos of everyone screaming on the Splash Mountain final drop, you’ll that almost every single car has at least one empty seat. 

To be fair to Tokyo Disneyland, I think they realize this, because Splash Mountain has the only single rider line in the entire park, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they stopped using it entirely. No one wants to be a single rider in Japan.

I’ve spent the last two and a half years working here to try to bridge Western and Japanese efforts towards sustainable seafood, and one of the things I’ve repeatedly stressed to the Westerners I work with is the need to belong to your group.  Breaking from the pack and doing something different or doing something alone is a pretty big deal, and asking for it to happen a pretty big non-starter. So for now there's a lot of conversation about the topic, and not much doing of anything. To my thinking this is okay. Because at some point if you can get the group to agree, when they do something, they do it together and they do it en masse.  This gives me a tremendous amount of hope for Japan, and when I see that completely empty single riders line it does feel like Disneyland Tokyo is the happiest place on earth.