This is the fun, weird, and surprisingly complicated story of Disney’s PeopleMover attraction and how it ended up somewhere unexpected. And maybe even somewhere really unexpected!
A Plethora of Extras from the Story of Disney's Third PeopleMover
Conspiracy theory for this world - since powered vehicles always come to life, whereas sentient rolling stock is rare in most of the world, Walt Disney invented the peoplemover so he could have public transit without having to account for the needs and rights of sapient vehicles in his proposed EPCOT city?
Oh that's not even a conspiracy. (Except for Disney)
How to make vehicles non-sentient has long been the wet dream of a lot of governments and big organizations. The ability to not have to pay wages for a massive battleship/oil tanker/locomotive are very appealing, and many, many attempts have been made to build craft in a way that are "non-sentient".
It very rarely works, but still, they try.
It's actually why a lot of naval vessels are named after geographic places as opposed to human names - for a very long time, it was believed that giving them non-human names would make them less likely to be built alive.
This is of course utter horseshit, and actually has contributed to a lot of the human-machine divide in a lot of country's navies, as the official stance of US Navy until the 80's was that they never built a vessel intending for it to be alive, which meant that a lot of ships either had serious underlying issues about being "wanted", or were generally not treated that well.
(Of course, at the end of the day, the most navies did deal with the issue and commission the vessels anyways, albeit not always without faults - USS Iowa was notably a raging bitch for most of her life, in no small part because she was immediately given the rank of Rear Admiral straight out of the shipyard.)
This attitude even pervaded some non-naval institutions, as while the USAF treated most of their jets like normal people, NASA had a notable divide between its air- and space-craft fleet and the human employee population after the start of the Space Shuttle program. (The Apollo program didn't involve many sentient craft for obvious reasons) This divide worsened after the events of STS-51L and STS-27R, and the Shuttle fleet basically kept to themselves out in Florida, ignoring most of NASA unless they needed to publish a paper or something. Some catastrophically bad KSC administrators in the early 90s cemented this opinion, and a lot of the more 'interesting' things that happened in the shuttle program in the 90s and 2000s occurred without NASA's higher-ups knowing.
Of course, that's a very America-centric viewpoint, and a lot of other countries don't do that - Japan being one notable country, instead treating their new Naval Self Defense Force ships like any other human. The Norwegians are also very good at this, as the largest ship of their postwar navy - The (former) German Battleship Tirpitz - is a major believer in the "nurture" side of the "nature vs nurture" argument, and considering that she's been in the Norwegian Navy since the 40's, she kinda gets to make those decisions. (Without going into a lot of detail/another long tangent, her older brother Bismarck was violent and fanatical and Tirpitz... wasn't. She personally puts a lot of stock into how the different Kreigsmarine fleet yards treated the two when they were being built.)
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Oh yeah, this was supposed to be about Disney, wasn't it?
Walt Disney actually had no qualms about including sentient vehicles in his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. He was a noted railfan for most of his life, and employed many vehicles in all capacities across the Disney Company - in fact, EPCOT, and all other Disney parks are specially designed with wide paths specifically to allow vehicles to enter the park.
That being said, the Peoplemover ride itself was designed for its vehicles to be non-sentient, however it wasn't for any nefarious or conspiratorial reasons. While Disney's Monorail fleet at least has over 100 miles of tracks to run on, the Peoplemover is basically a captive loop, with one station and no track to the outside world. Putting a sentient vehicle in the system would be cruel at best. Thus, the WEDway system was used.
The WEDway system is basically a floor-mounted motor drive system for public transit applications, and as such, doesn't have sentient (unpowered) rolling stock. This solves a lot of the moral issues that come with building captive systems like peoplemovers and subways, as it allows for the loop to be built as a cheap self-contained system instead of one requiring more expensive outside connections.
Celebrating Roy O. Disney, born this day, June 24, 1893! Photos of Roy at Disneyland are very few. Here's a couple during the construction of the "new" Tomorrowland in 1967. #vintagedisneyland #disneyland #roydisney #disney #peoplemover #happiestplaceonearth #wedway #wedwaypeoplemover (at Disneyland) https://www.instagram.com/p/CB0-kiEJ-lG/?igshid=19bt3cw0gq604
