6. Jungle Cruise

The boats at Jungle Cruise embody everything that’s great about Disney Imagineering. Each vehicle flows steadily downstream, allowing guests to witness all of nature’s ferocity…and hear some of the worst jokes ever told. What’s brilliant about the boats is that they’re on rails. You’ve likely noticed this during one of your journeys. Many captains take their hands off the steering wheel during the ride. They can do this because the steering wheel does absolutely nothing.

Jungle Cruise isn’t technically an Omnimover, a technology that Imagineers wouldn’t invent until a decade later. It’s functionally similar, though. Disney controls the throughput by transporting each ride vehicle at a steady pace. Better yet, they can have a lot of these boats in the water at the same time.

Each of these cruise ships can host about 20 people, depending on the size of the individuals. That particular variance is unusual for Disney ride carts; it’s also something that they’ve tried to eliminate since the first days of Disneyland. Most motion vehicles at Disney have a fixed capacity. Jungle Cruise has variables, but we can make solid estimates. For a seven-minute boat ride plus the time needed to load and unload, Disney can host about 1,650 people per hour. That’s 23,100 worth of traffic in a day.

5. Space Mountain

Here’s where things get a bit counterintuitive. Space Mountain doesn’t have the single cart capacity of Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. It’s not even close. That’s because it’s a vehicle with three single-seat rows. Two of them depart simultaneously, meaning that Space Mountain only satisfies six customers per trip. That’s…not a lot.

The trick to why this attraction has such great throughput is an old banking secret. Space Mountain makes it up in volume. The ride has 3,035 feet of track, and it takes place in the dark. It also goes a modest 28 miles per hour. It also has 30 coaster trains, a ridiculously large number. For all of these reasons, Space Mountain can have a lot of trains in place at once. It’s even automated – the first automated roller coaster ever – and offers cast members complete control of each cart.

Space Mountain is a giant feeder chain of coaster carts. You just don’t notice it during the ride because you’re traveling in the dark. In fact, the only way that you could notice is if you count all of the loading done in the span of a 10-minute wait. It’s only at this point that you’ll appreciate how much throughput Space Mountain has. It can host 1,850 people per hour, which equals 25,900 satisfied customers over the course of the day.

4. Under the Sea – Journey of the Little Mermaid

Image: DisneyDisney deserves a lot of credit for this attraction. They introduced it in 2011 as the perfect combination of thematically satisfying and crowd-pleasing. The unstated purpose of Under the Sea is to pull traffic toward a different part of Magic Kingdom. To achieve this goal, Disney had to employ one of their favorite techniques: the Omnimover.

The Omnimover is a critical concept at Disney theme parks. These ride carts aren’t individual in nature. Instead, they’re tethered (well, welded) together and placed on a conveyor belt. That way, each “vehicle” moves at a set pace, making throughput easily calculable. Disney handles attraction crowd control best with Omnimovers.

In the case of Under the Sea, up to three guests board a clamshell vehicle. It’s A) adorable and B) part of an integrated system of ride carts that will travel down the conveyor belt from the loading area until the unloading area. The only thing that stops the process is if Disney has to stop the entire conveyor belt, which happens more often than you might think. Anyone in a wheelchair could need assistance since the Omnimover departure process also works on a timer. Even with these hiccups, Under the Sea serves 2,050 customers per hour, giving it a daily allotment of 28,700.