Originally posted by Goobergal99
Um, I was just making a joke about the wheelchairs, and actually I remember about 10 years ago, being able to go through the exit to board because my aunt was in a wheelchair. Maybe they don't do it anymore though
Things have changed in 10 years.
The newer parks (AK and the Studio) and the newer or recently renovated rides in the older parks were built with
Mainstream Access, which basically means the lines were constructed to be wheelchair/ecv accessible (wide enough passages, no or limited stairs). In Mainstream lines, everyone waits in the same line. For some rides (like HM, the Safari at AK, Dinosaur, Buzz Lightyear, Splash Mountain), wheelchair users need to board at somewhere other than the regular boarding area. For many of those "special boarding areas", wheelchair users wait in the regular line until just before the line reaches the boarding area. At that point, they are pulled off to the exit to board. Boarding at the exit often involves an extra wait, so it usually doesn't save any time; just makes boarding possible for someone who could not board the regular way. Our extra wait at Buzz Lightyear often means we are still waiting at the exit to board when we see the people who were right ahead of us in line getting off the ride. Our longest extra wait was 40 minutes at the Safari at a time when the stand-by line was just walking on.
There are some older rides where they could not make the line accessible, so the accessible entrance is still going thru the exit, but there are not that many rides left that operate like that. One example of is SpaceShip Earth, which actually has a little lounge area outside the exit for people with disabilities to wait. Usually the wait is about the same as in the standby line (during times when the standby line has no wait, the disabled line still waits).
