Traffic Management, Disney Style

An updated control room monitors the gridlock of its lines and engineers ways to cut the congestion and control the traffic.

"To handle over 30 million annual visitors - many of them during this busiest time of year for the mega-resort - Disney World long ago turned the art of crowd control into a science. But the putative Happiest Place on Earth has decided it must figure out how to quicken the pace even more. A cultural shift toward impatience - fed by video games and smartphones - is demanding it, park managers say. To stay relevant to the entertain-me-right-this-second generation, Disney must evolve.

And so it has spent the last year outfitting an underground, nerve center to address that most low-tech of problems, the wait. Located under Cinderella Castle, the new center uses video cameras, computer programs, digital park maps and other whiz-bang tools to spot gridlock before it forms and deploy countermeasures in real time."