Disneyland

Park Dedication

To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America, with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world. -- Dedication, 1955

Park Overview

Disneyland is the world's most famous regional theme park. Walt Disney led it's development early 1950s, leading up to an opening day in 1955. The park was the first real attempt at strong story elements (theming) for an amusement park. It has served as a proving ground for park planning and attraction designs that have developed into a thriving industry. Because of its instant popularity - which came as a surprise to most investors - the park was quickly surrounded by third party hotels, restaurants, and shops. This landlocked the park, making it difficult to add expansions. As a result, the attractions at Disneyland are very tightly packed. Among the Disney parks, it has the most attractions, despite being one of the smallest parks geographically speaking.

The close quarters of the park have a few interesting side effects. First, it makes travel times shorter. Attractions are packed together, so it is relatively fast to get from one attraction to the next. This also means that as guests go from place to place, they pass dozens of things to do. Frequent visitors to Walt Disney World will comment that Disneyland’s smaller scale takes away a sense of grandeur. However, that grandeur is replaced with charm and adventure. Among Disney fans, Disneyland is known as the only park worked on by Walt Disney himself.

Second, the park can feel more crowded. There are a lot of people trying to navigate the park, so walkways crowded easily fill with people. Even if lines are short, the paths often feel packed. As a result, you can’t judge the wait times only by the crowds. In 2019, Disneyland completed Project Stardust, which made small but impactful adjustments to crowd flow: changing planter locations, adjusting curbs, and broadening paths were a few of the changes made. These made a substantial difference for the traffic flow, so even though it looks packed, the crowds can normally flow fairly smoothly.

Wait Times

Below are graphs showing wait times for some of the key attractions at the park. We track posted wait times, and use them to predict what wait times will be each day. We make live updates to these predictions, so they will adjust to the current crowd levels in the park. The orange line with the circle markers shows the wait times that Disney has posted today. The blue line shows our prediction. The light-gold shaded region shows wait times that we would consider average – these are the range of wait times you can expect on a day that’s not too crowded or too slow.

Fantasyland

Tomorrowland

Frontierland

Adventureland

New Orleans Square

Mickey's ToonTown

Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge

Bayou Country

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