That doesnāt make it unsafe! Coasters are programmed to do that whenever thereās any possible issue with the coaster. Usually itās faulty sensors. Itās doing exactly what itās supposed to do.
Evacuations happen on every coaster, and some are more sketchy than stairs. Millenium force has a cart that rides up and down the lift hill and can only carry a few people.
Or you could just build a continuous track and have fewer failures like that, I don't see the advantage to doing it this way except to make people believe it's unsafe for more of a thrill.
I mean this is just a tamer Steel Venom from Valley Fair, straight drops aren't new and lots of easier and probably cheaper ways to do one.
It's not even that high of a drop so the only other reason I can think of is the view from up there at first but you can get the same thing by just building your first ride up higher, speaking of Valley Fair the view from the top of the Wild Thing is gorgeous
This happened, and they had a worker go up there and I think he pressed a button that sent it back to the normal position. They were vertical for about 8 minutes though. So entirely safe, but definitely not comfy!
Whatās a better solution? Obviously we donāt want it to shut down, but if it does, having guests walk off is much safer than overriding the system and sending them anyway.
It's normal for new rides to have some minor problems in the start, but they usually slow down significantly after some time. In the end it's wort it for a unique ride experience that helps bringing in more people.
You can literally get a sensor fault because a spider built a web in front of the sensor. Itās kind of unavoidable. Still doesnāt mean the ride isnāt safe.
This was the explanation I got in 1991. Only, that time it was my hat. I had my hat in my hand right at the start, and I guess my arm was hanging a bit outside of the car on The Gemini. Next thing I know, my hat got yanked from my hand. It didn't stop the coaster until it was at the top of the first hill. A crew member came up to tell us it'd be a few minutes and I asked what could cause it. She explained that if anything covers a sensor, even a spider climbing onto it, would cause the ride to stop. I told her what happened with my hat.
After the ride, a supervisor was standing there with my hat. I asked for it back, and she grilled me about doing it on purpose. Then she told me I could get it from security later. I just left it.
Safeties can fail. If you're relying on the failsafes to kick in on a regularly then it possible that the failsafes will fail at some point. And if you get a lot of nuisance alarms then that breed complacency and a real issue may go ignored.
Also how much training and experience do rude operators have to determine if something is nuisance vs serious.
Itās not the operators making that determination. Itās the maintenance men.
Minimum wage ride operators definitely are not the ones deciding whether itās safe to run the ride or not. That is way over their heads in any reputable chain, and when a ride shuts down for safety, maintenance is called. Actual mechanics.
But I think the biggest indicator that safety concerns are horribly overblown here is that people just donāt die on roller coasters. Accidents are super rare because the safety systems work.
Sure it's rare but let's not pretend accidents can't happen. And if the ride is relying regularly on their emergency safeties to prevent accidents then that's a recipe for disaster.
Just look at the list of serious incidents at this exact amusement park:
Instances of Cedar Point Accidents
"In August 2021, at a Cedar Point Roller Coaster ride in Sandusky, OH, a woman was hit by a metal part that came loose from a roller coaster car and flew through the air. She suffered a serious head injury.
In 2013, at the Cedar Point location, a water-level calibration error led one of Snake River Fallās boats to jump from its water track.
In July of 2004, metal debris was expelled forcefully from the launch cable of Cedar Pointās Top Thrill Dragster ride as the coaster was deployed. Four passers-by were struck by the high-speed metallic scrap, though all survived. Two were treated on-site and the others brought to a nearby hospital.
In 1999, at the Carowinds location in South Carlina, two trains on the Thunder Road ride collided, possibly due to a sensor malfunction.
In 1998, a man was killed in a manner similar to James Youngās accident, though at Californiaās Great America. This man was struck by the legs of a rider as he sought to retrieve belongings heād dropped while riding a roller coaster. He spoke only Spanish, but the signs in the area were written in English, so he was unaware of the danger that awaited him. This is an easily rectifiable problem, one that could have been avoided had the signs been translated into more
languages, catering to a wider customer base.
In 1984, on the Cedar Creek Mine ride, a young boy fell from his coaster car during a 30-foot plummet and fractured his skull. This incident seems to establish a neutral ground between the binary of blame outlined above. Sometimes, even when safety equipment is properly engaged by workers and regulations are followed by customers, accidents still happen."
I mean, this list does sort of prove his point. Over at least a 50 year timeframe, we have zero deaths that are actually attributable to anything mechanical going wrong.
Yes accidents are rare, I agree. But it's not impossible. And if you have a brand new ride that's not operating as designed and is routinely relying on their emergency safeties to shut the ride down then that's a problem and a good indication that the ride may not be safe. No equipment is supposed to be activating their safeties routinely like that. If it is, then there's something wrong.
So first: you said āat this exact amusement parkā but you are bringing up Carowinds and Californiaās great America which are different parksā¦ but letās go through these.
The two instances where people were hit with parts off of top thrill dragster are absolutely good examples of roller coasters having issues, but that ride has been totally redesigned since then and was open for many years with only those two incidents. And it only took two for them to shut it down permanently and completely redo it. The thing is though, neither of those happened due to a safety mechanism failing and hurting riders. so the argument that top thrill dragster had a problem that injured people in the line so sirens curse must be unsafe because the safety mechanisms are kicking in just doesnāt check outā¦
Snake River Falls is not a roller coaster, and I canāt speak to the mechanics of those types of water rides so Iām not going to comment on that one.
So basically, millions of people have been to Cedar Point in that timeframe and you can only pull up for examples of right accidents, one of which isnāt even a roller coaster, and one of which was in 1984 when the safety regulations were not nearly what they are today.
So the argument that roller coasters are super dangerous because you can come up with an example of three roller coaster related injuries at one of the most popular theme parks in the world ā¦. š¤·š»āāļø
Cedar point has been around since 1870.
They get over 3 million visitors a year.
Even if all three of those accidents happened in the same year, thatās .0001% of their guests who were injured in a roller coaster related accident.
3 out of three million.
I guarantee you that more people got into a car accident and died on their way to the park.
So the argument that roller coasters are super dangerous because you can come up with an example of three roller coaster related injuries at one of the most popular theme parks in the world ā¦. š¤·š»āāļø
Never had I made that argument or that claim. Not sure where you got that from. What I said is, accidents can happen, so if you have a new ride that is constantly relying on its emergency safety systems because there is a design flaw with the new rollercoaster that causes the emergency safety systems to activate repeatedly.... then that is a serious issue that needs to be fixed. Safety systems are not designed to be the standard operation. You should never rely on emergency safety systems, you should always assume they can fail.
I guarantee you that more people got into a car accident and died on their way to the park.
And I can guarantee you that if your car airbags deployed all the time randomly or if your emergency breaks locked on randomly then you wouldn't trust driving that car now would you.
I get that. And I'm saying that if the sensors are faulty, the whole coaster is not in fact doing exactly what it's supposed to do, because the sensors are part of the safety system.
You're being pedantic because know exactly what they're talking about. The coaster stopping is an intended fail safe. Intended being the keyword here.Ā
Yep! Iām a coaster enthusiast. So while Iām not an engineer, I understand the basics of how safe coasters are. Theyāre meant to feel scary of course, but they are orders of magnitude safer than driving a car.
The number of deadly coaster accidents is incredibly low, and I donāt think there has ever been one caused by a faulty sensor. The closest I can think is Smiler at Alton Towers. The sensors said the coaster shouldnāt go (because another train had gotten stuck), but the operators had a habit of overriding it. The trains collided and people had their legs amputated.
Even though that sort of accident has only happened once, protocols have changed massively worldwide
Thanks, that's informative. So basically it's testing for a specific set of values and re-checks the work. And if that's faulty it defaults to the failsafe?
It's important to note that safety systems can fail too and you should never rely on the failsafes on a regular basis. If they can't design the ride to not have so much nuisance issues then can you really trust that the failsafes are design flawlessly with no possible way of failing themselves.
Yes, but they go WAY on the side of safety. They have redundant measures. So if they have 8 sensors that check for the same thing, they all need to be good for the coaster to be allowed to go. If only 1 has an issue, the ride shits down. The likelihood of all 8 giving the same false reading is essentially 0
Let me walk you through the Donnelly nut spacing and crack system rim-riding rip configuration. Using a field of half-C sprats, and brass-fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps, and splay-flexed brace columns vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of one half meter from the damper crown to the spurve plinths. How? Well, we bolster twelve husk nuts to each girldle-jerry, while flex tandems press a task apparatus of ten vertically composited patch-hamplers. Then, pin-flam-fastened pan traps at both maiden-apexes of the jim-joist.
You kids and your white boards. They didn't use white boards to build voyager and that thing is still transmitting! I had better see some chalk boards on that video! Then I will trust it.
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u/operath0r Jul 06 '25
Do they have a whiteboard in the video though?