Expedition Everest drops Single Rider. Disney found another way to fill the seat.

What Single Rider is actually for

A single rider line exists to fill a seat that would otherwise go around the track empty. It is not there as a favor to anybody.

Disney’s own guest services page, checked Saturday, says as much. Single Rider, it says, lets a group split up and ride separately, and your party “will be separated to fill remaining seats in a ride vehicle” that the standby and Lightning Lane queues have not already taken. Standby is the regular free line everybody waits in; Lightning Lane is the one you pay for. A seat that leaves the station empty is a rider the ride could have carried and didn’t, and enough of those make the wait longer for everybody.

The idea goes back to Walt Disney himself. In a memo to the Disneyland Operations Committee on July 31, 1958, he told them to “establish a special line for single riders, with the request that they double up.” It’s in Marcy Carriker Smothers’ book Walt’s Disneyland. Disney has now found another way to do that same job at Everest.

The arithmetic on Everest

Expedition Everest is the big roller coaster at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, built inside an artificial Himalayan mountain in the park’s Asia section, with an animatronic Yeti waiting near the end of the track.

The train runs six cars and seats riders two across. Five cars carry three rows each and the last carries two, so 17 rows, 34 riders. Disney does not publish those figures. They come from fan sites that have measured the ride, and they are the numbers people have used for years.

The trouble is the two-across layout. A family of four takes two rows exactly. Make it a party of three and you get one full row plus half of another, and that half is a seat the train carries around the mountain with nobody in it. That is one wasted seat on a train that leaves every minute or so, all day long. It adds up.

Disney calls its employees cast members. One of them works the load platform, spots a row with one seat open, and waves over the next person in the single rider queue, so the train goes out full.

What changed in May

Around May, according to WDWMagic, Disney started sorting the standby line before it reaches the platform. In the last holding area, which fans call the red room, cast members split guests by whether their party has an odd or an even number of people in it. Evens go one way, odds go the other.

It sounds fussy. Here is what it does at the load. Even-numbered parties drop straight into rows of two and take them whole. The odd ones get paired off with each other: a three and a one, or two threes, or a one and a one. And a party of one is a single rider. So standby is now doing the job the dedicated queue used to do.

That left the single rider line with almost nothing to do. By late May riders were reporting long waits at the single rider entrance, because a single rider only gets called now when the odd side has nobody left in it.

Here is Disney’s reason, as four of those sites paraphrased it on Friday. None of them quotes anyone by name. As standby got more efficient, the dedicated queue stopped giving people the quick trip they came to that entrance for. Disney also told those sites that Single Rider still does real work at other rides, where it fills seats the two main lines leave empty.

Is this about Lightning Lane?

The suspicious version goes like this. Single Rider is a free way past a long wait, Disney sells a paid way past the same wait, so of course the free one goes.

It does not hold up. Tom Bricker of Disney Tourist Blog, who has covered these lines for years, called Lightning Lane “a non-factor” in a post on Friday, and pointed at Disney’s own recent behavior: “In less than the last 2 years, they’ve added Single Rider to Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure and (sometimes) Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. They’ve brought it back at Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring the Muppets and Test Track. If there were some concerted effort to eliminate Single Rider and push guests towards purchasing Lightning Lanes, Disney is executing it terribly.”

Everest is also on the cheaper of the two paid options, which makes it a strange place to start if the goal were to sell more of them. It is covered by Lightning Lane Multi Pass, which starts you with three ride reservations in one park and lets you add more one at a time as you use them. The per-attraction Single Pass that Disney charges for separately does not cover it. Animal Kingdom Multi Pass has been running roughly $15 to $22 per person per day this month, according to price tracking at Thrill Data, and Disney publishes no fixed rate.

Universal pulled a single rider line of its own this week

Across town in Orlando, Skull Island: Reign of Kong reopened Friday at Universal’s Islands of Adventure without its dedicated single rider queue, which WDW News Today describes as indefinitely closed. Nobody has called it permanent, and Universal has said nothing about the queue itself. The Universal app was still showing a single rider option for the ride afterward, which may only mean the app listing is stale.

Instead guests get a printed slip called a Single Attraction Pass with a QR code on it. One guest, one use, one location. It is not limited to Kong. It buys a trip through Express, which is Universal’s paid line, on most rides across Universal Studios Florida and Islands of Adventure. WDW News Today lists the exceptions as Pteranodon Flyers, Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure and Jurassic World VelociCoaster.

The ride itself reopened in a reduced state, running with a black curtain where the large Kong animatronic used to be. Universal told Attractions Magazine that “during routine maintenance, the King Kong animatronic sustained damage and is undergoing repairs.” Universal has tied the curtain to that repair.

The two closures are not the same decision. Disney found another way to fill the empty seat and then retired the line that used to do it. At Universal nothing has replaced what the Kong queue did at the load. Express does not care how many people are in your party, so a group of three walking in that way leaves behind exactly the kind of empty seat a single rider used to take. Universal has not said whether Kong’s seats get filled some other way now.

Parks and where they stand

Disney’s own listing leaves five permanent single rider lines at Walt Disney World after Sunday, and one of the five runs on and off.

The on-and-off one is Rise of the Resistance. Disney lists it, but Disney Tourist Blog still describes it as a makeshift line entered near the ride exit that comes and goes. Do not build a day around it.

A few other rides run one now and then without advertising it. Soarin’ Around the World at EPCOT and Avatar Flight of Passage at Animal Kingdom sometimes post a sign near the end of the queue telling single riders to ask a cast member. Space Mountain at Magic Kingdom has been trying something more interesting this year, sending single riders in through the Lightning Lane entrance and splitting them off where the two queues come together before the platform. None of these is on the official list. Ask on the day.

If you were planning an Animal Kingdom day around riding Everest by yourself, Sunday is the last date Disney has given you. After that your options are the standby line, which the new sorting is meant to speed up, or Multi Pass.