Stroller Size Matters, No Smoking At Disneyland

ANAHEIM, CA — Disneyland Resort is making some changes over the next few months, and most of it revolves around crowd comfort and control. With crammed walkways on the busiest park days, the resort has bought into smoking areas and stroller width to reclaim some more space.

Starting May 1, wide strollers and children's push wagons will no longer be allowed and Disneyland is nixing smoking areas.

Walt Disney Co. has been a crowd-control pioneer dating back to Disneyland's earliest days.
Despite regular price increases the throngs of fans continue to grow, challenging the resort managers to devise new ways to squeeze more people into the same space safely.

The park will ban strollers wider than 31 inches and prohibit the ubiquitous wagons that many parents use to push children through the resort, in an effor to ease pedestrian congestion. (The park already bans pull wagons.)

At the moment, the park allows strollers as wide as 36 inches.

Outside of the security screening areas, visitors will have some way to measure their strollers -- probably with lines painted on the sidewalk, 31 inches apart, park representatives said.

What do you do if you arrive and your stroller is too wide? The park rents strollers for $15 a day.

Four designated smoking areas will be removed at the resort to clear walkways and improve traffic flow, a move that will make both Disneyland and neighboring California Adventure Park smoke-free for the first time in resort history. One smoking area, a collection of benches near Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, is located along one of three walkways that will serve as entrances into the new Star Wars land.

The park has no other idle space where the smoking area can be moved, Theiler said.
Another smoking area in the California Adventure Park, near the Silly Symphony Swings, one in the esplanade between the two parks, and a fourth in the Downtown Disney shopping district will also be eliminated.

Once all four smoking areas are removed, park visitors who want to smoke will have to either use the smoking areas near the three resort hotels or go to open areas beyond the security screeners near the edges of the resort.

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