Mickey and Friends parking – new security.

I agree that improvements to the security process are long overdue. The temporary-looking tents they've been using for the last 13 years aren't fooling anybody; security screenings are here to stay. Hopefully the newly-designed permanent solutions will look better and have adequate capacity for the current needs

That said, the design they chose for the M&F tram plaza doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The new bump-out puts the 'clean' area next to the first loading zone in the plaza, which means that trams will either be loading and unloading at the same area, or they'll have to drive past it to unload and then circle back again to load, neither of which make sense. It also makes for a relatively small 'clean' area beyond the screening point, and doesn't leave a lot of room for queues at the bottom of the escalators. Nothing about this setup, from the tents to the painted pavement to the old parking lot light poles, looks permanent, so hopefully there is more work to be done after the holiday rush

I also question the wisdom of having large exposed crowds of guests so close to an unsecured structure like the parking garage, making for an easy target, but I guess it will be a similar setup at the new Pumbaa garage too

 

Here's a rough concept sketch I did a while back, when work first began in that area. The red line is the tram path, with the blue as the outline of the tram load/unload plaza; the yellow blob is the approximate location of a security checkpoint, with landscaped areas to separate the 'clean' and 'dirty' sides

From the work that they've done since then, it's clear that they're not currently planning on widening the southwest quadrant of the tram plaza, which makes me wonder what their plan is. As I previously stated, the current design looks oh-so-temporary (despite not being a particularly fast construction timeline), but I haven't seen any indication of what layout they may want in the longterm. Although some people have speculated that this set up will be a "test" to see what works, I'm sure the designers have a pretty darn good idea of what they'll need before the first guest ever uses it; it will be interesting to see what (if anything) changes after it enters operation

 

Currently, if you park in M&F you have two waits: one for the tram and then another at bag check.

Ideally, an adequately staffed and more permanent security area will mean a quicker trip through bag check than currently. Add to that the fact that you'll only have to wait in line with other people who parked at M&F at roughly the same time you did, as opposed to now when the west side bag check includes that plus people coming from the Disney hotels and walking through DTD.

Plus, (again, ideally) the security check takes up time that you'd just have spent waiting in line for the tram anyway. In other words, if the x-number of people waiting for the tram means a 10 minute wait for the tram, it might not matter that much if you have a backup/delay before the final queue for the tram. Kind of like how they "stack" people now in the standby lines for Indy and Space before they let you in to the indoor portions, (to accommodate fastpass, which won't be there for the trams presumably!) So imagine a security area at the entrance to the indoor queue of Space in which no fastpass people are admitted; you just have to go through security. It used to take about 15 minutes in the days before fastpass to get through the indoor section of the Space queue. If there's a delay at the entrance for security, it still should only take you roughly 15 minutes between that delay and the indoor queue because whatever time is taken to do security is then erased by x-number of people in the indoor queue having moved forward while that security delay happened for you.

So... ideally... the new setup could mean less time overall between your car and the front gate by essentially consolidating two waits into one.

Ideally.