Disneyland-area bus operator will close down in March 2026 angielski

As background from the Wikipedia page, the Anaheim Transit Network (ATN) was established as a city-sponsored non-profit in 1998 to operate bus lines around the Disneyland resort in California, with private funding from the various hotels in the area to run this public bus system. These hotels are obliged to operate or pay for shuttles to Disneyland as part of their development agreements with the city, presumably to avoid untold amounts of automobile traffic.

As the linked press release says, ATN will shutter its operations on 31 March 2026. The area will still be served by Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA), the county-wide bus service, but looking at the bus lines near Disneyland, coverage seems non-optimal as a replacement to ATN’s service.

Other reporting indicates that the City of Anaheim was unwilling to invest further into ATN (despite earlier indications), nor were the hotel operators.

What I find utterly inexplicable is that these stakeholders – especially the city – are not recognizing this fact: data from Q3 2025 shows that ATN fixed-buses moved 96,300 average daily riders. From the same document, the USA’s heavy rail systems did not exceed that rate, except in the San Francisco, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, and NY/NJ areas. Basically, ATN was moving metro rail levels of people on buses.

I shudder to imagine how bad this will be for Anaheim once the closure occurs, where workers, visitors, and all other former riders will need to figure out how to move around Anaheim. Ride share automobiles hardly have enough capacity to absorb even a fraction of the prior riders, let alone more automobiles, even if they all carpooled. And seeing as many visitors to Disneyland use the buses to stay at farther hotels to reduce costs, this is a negative attraction. The difficulty of car-seats on ride share made the buses particularly attractive to transport younger children safely.

Each individual hotel operator made an economic choice to not properly fund ATN, but together they will all lose out. Likewise, I don’t see how the City of Anaheim is going to make up the transportation capacity around the Disneyland area. Disneyland itself isn’t party to the agreement that funds ATN, but they do contract with ATN to shuttle visitors from a far-flung parking lot. But they too will be impacted if staff and guests can’t afford to get to the park.

Everyone is going to be worse off, and no one is stepping up to the plate to keep the buses rolling, when it’s clearly the obvious thing to do.