I don't dispute that (assuming that the passive cooling does indeed work as advertised.) However, I've never tried to argue that buses are preferable or faster. My only point of opinion in this regard concerns whether the Skyliner will at times develop queues of 30 minutes or more, and I think that the answer to that is yes, it well might. (I believe that the dispatch speed will decline a bit in practice. I am guessing it will end up somewhere closer to 30-40 seconds, because with the REALLY large number of strollers at WDW, getting off will be slower than getting on, and they will probably need to adjust for that. Still quite fast, but not as fast as testing with no passengers to deal with.)
I agree with most of your comments I still think that 30 minute queues are never going to happen.
Think like this:
- Worse queues by far will be at Epcot park closing when masses of people are leaving at once.
- People will come out of IG to travel to 4 resorts (CBR, AOA, Pop, and Riviera when it opens.) Possible a few people going back to the DHS parking lot.
- The gondola can take away one bus load of people every 60 seconds.
- Right now, those people are heading to the front of Epcot and waiting for buses. It maybe takes 4 buses to clear all the people going to each of those resorts, but current takes close to an hour to accomplish that. So let's say 16 buses for the four resorts show up between 9 PM and 10 PM when the park closes at 9 PM. Some skip out early from Illuminations, some leave the second Illuminations ends, some dawdle along. They don't all show up at the same time. They're probably spread out across 30-45 minutes leaving the park.
- The gondola can take all those people for all four resorts away in SIXTEEN MINUTES. Not an hour+ like the buses. 16 minutes. That many people won't be able to GET to the gondola in 16 minutes.
Yes there will be surges at times, and you might find a 5-10 minute wait occasionally, but I'm telling you a 30 minute wait will take 2000 people in front of you in line for the gondola. That's 33 busloads of people showing up at the exact same time.
One last point - part of the reason stand-by lines are so long is because of the Fastpass system. A ride like TSMM has 60 minute standby waits because 50-75% of the people getting on the ride are using FP+ and are only waiting 5-10 minutes to get in line. IF TSMM didn't have FP+ the lines would rarely be more than 20-30 minutes. (Well, that's not true, because you would actually get more people waiting in the line for the rides - but I digress.) The Gondolas won't have FP lines. No FP means shorter waits. And as someone else pointed out, you are generally not going to get people saying "I'm going to just ride the gondola for fun" at park closing.
I have some concerns about the gondolas but long lines is not one of them.