Main Street, U.S.A. at your own eye height, in the crowd of the hour you choose, under that hour’s sun and sky.
Each spot from your eye height, past the crowd you set: how much of the castle reaches you. Pick one to stand there.
When a parade is coming, people line the route. Stand at the rope or further back.
Pick one to stand on Main Street ten minutes before it starts.
From your eye height, how much of the castle each spot keeps as the usual crowd gathers before the night’s fireworks, and when it falls under a third.
Stand in a ride’s own queue, its lanes and switchbacks where they are, at your own eye height. The line moves the way lines do, a shuffle at a time, and takes the ride’s usual standby for the hour you chose, while the sun, the weather and the day go on around you. Where the Lightning Lane runs beside it, its guests walk past; where the queue holds a scene of its own, you come to it on the way.
The ride
Your wait
Close by
In the queue
On wheels, in Disney’s words
Every piece of this street is drawn from a record, and the page is built again every morning. Here is which record each piece comes from, so you know what to plan by.
The buildings are OpenStreetMap’s, standing at the heights its mappers recorded, with the trees they mapped, the water, the street car’s rails and the walkways. The castle is our model of the parts its mappers drew. Castle in view counts how much of that model reaches your eyes past the crowd, the buildings and the trees, pixel by pixel.
Each person starts at an eye height: the rider standing at 62 inches, the grandparent at 60, a scooter at 50, a wheelchair and a bench at 46, a child 44 inches tall at 40, a baby in the stroller at 33. Slide it anywhere from 24 to 78 inches to match the people in your own party.
The sun stands where it stands over Magic Kingdom at the date and minute you choose, worked out the way NOAA works out the sun’s position. The weather is the hour’s own, from the forecast and the records we keep for each hour at the park.
How many people stand around you follows our own average standby for that hour across Magic Kingdom’s rides: a busy hour fills the street, a quiet one thins it. The mark on the slider is that usual. Move it to see a quieter day or a busier one.
Shows run at the times on the day’s schedule, which we read every morning. A parade comes down the route Disney marks for it, and the fireworks burst over the castle at their own time. On another date nothing moves, because no show time is made up.
Each queue is the one OpenStreetMap’s mappers drew for the ride, its switchbacks and all. Your wait is the ride’s usual standby for the hour, an average from our records, never a live wait. Where a Lightning Lane is mapped beside it, its guests walk past you; it never gets a wait, because we hold none. The nearest restroom and drink are walked from the back of the line.
In a wheelchair or on a scooter, steps with no ramp marked and rough or limited ground show on the path ahead, from OpenStreetMap’s own tags, the nearest three with how far away they are. What a ride asks of you, such as staying in your wheelchair or transferring, is quoted word for word from Disney’s own pages.
For the night’s fireworks, each spot on Main Street and at the hub is read from your eye height every ten minutes through the hour before the show, as the usual crowd gathers, and the page says when your view of the castle falls under a third. Disney’s viewing areas for guests with disabilities sit where its guide map puts them.