I should probably just stay out of this entirely, but I’m feeling feisty, so…
I’ve been doing these WDW races a long time now. I’ve seen all sorts of changes in PoT requirements, corrals, etc. NOTHING has made any difference in crowding. Back when everyone without a PoT was put into the very last corral? Crowded. When they opened up most of the corrals to non-PoTs? Still crowded. Mini waves? Crowded. A gazillion smaller corrals? Crowded. Same complaints every. Single. Race. About walkers and etiquette and too many non-PoTers in a corral and not enough corrals and too many corrals and so on.
You’ve got thousands of people doing a huge variety of
average paces in the same place at the same time because you’ve got people who start in early corrals stoppping for photos and falling backward into the field, you’ve got faster people who start in back corrals not stopping for photos pushing forward into the field, and even within the “no PoT” set, there’s a huge variance in paces. Now add in run-walk, which is way more prevalent at rD races than anywhere else - average pace is almost irrelevant when trying to place people properly doing run-walk, because runner A might have a MUCH faster running pace than runner B, and runner C might be doing much longer run intervals than runner D, and so on. The things that make rD races so accessible and desirable to so many are exactly the things that gum up any strategy for keeping people of differing speeds separated.
That said, my personal experience has been that some amount of crowded/not so crowded race situations is pure luck. I’ve started in the same corral (or equivalent) for many, many races, and sometimes I find a lot more open road, and other times it’s a sea of humanity from start to finish. I genuinely do not think rD can or will do anything that will change that. And just to be clear - it’s not that crowding and course congestion don’t bother me: even at my slow pace, I get fed up with feeling like I can’t move at my preferred speed, and I get inwardly pretty cranky about a line of 10 people slow-walking across the course. But I’ve seen enough to get that it’s not changing and I can either try not to let it ruin my fun, or stop doing rD races.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.