I am familiar with the restraint design. They’re not “simple” lap bars but they are still considered lap bars.
There are a variety of lap bars. It is a category of restraint design, not one single type. They hold you in at your lap area versus around your shoulders.
but it does help keep riders in the proper position within the train - which could have saved a life in this situation.
We don’t know that. We don’t know where or how the injuries were sustained.
I'm not sure where you're confused. But I'll break this down for you. Disney and Universal in courting the overlapping audiences have roughly the same engagement targets--according to their own surveys, they understand that to have satisfied customers, these customers need to experience, on average, 1.5 attractions per hour during their time in the park. Epic already doesn't have enough rides for the park capacity University wants. That is, hardly anyone is experiencing 1.5 attractions per hour, on average, at Epic, which has been a problem all summer--this is why Epic is listed low on customer satification. Now Universal just lost their largest capacity attraction at Epic--about 2,500 riders per hour. (For comparison, Minecart Madness does about 1,000 riders per hour on a good day.). So with the dual coaster down, the hit to overall ride capacity is going to make even more difficult for customers to feel satisfied after a day in Epic. So there's a family tragedy here (the death of a loved one, which should be the focus right now), a safety problem (the coaster itself, which will take, at minimum, months to fully understand and likely fix), and also a marketing and operational problem (a park that already struggled with ride capacity issues just lost a lot of their ride capacity). That make sense?
I would guess that they're saying if you build a theme park with not enough rides to satisfy the customers and one of the rides has to close down it will result in a worse experience for the customers? Seems fairly straightforward to me.
When I said “things happen” it had nothing to do with minimizing this tragedy. I was saying that lots of things can happen to brand new major attractions - and if they go down - it puts strain on the entire operation.
Which is why I said “could” - it seems to me that it could have made a significant difference.
Yes, that is one reason why we're having this discussion--to take in what has been announced and collectively make an educated guess (or guesses) as to what happened. Again, the known information limits possibilities in certain ways. If we knew everything, there would be little discussion, just a news article on the WDW Magic main page.
Thanks. And this is exactly what some posts were suggesting would happen a few days ago, even to the point that changes or even temporary closures would happen first in England and Germany. Thorpe Park is England. So yes, the amusements community is starting to consider if there are design issues here that affect other coasters, especially in terms of who can ride. So we can now put aside objections that the amusements industry didn't consider this a design or guidance flaw as no other Mack coasters were affected. I think there's a pretty good chance that we'll see some similar revised guidance to the Voltron coaster (at Europa Park) in the next few days until the investigation in Orlando is complete.
Thorpe Park just put new restrictions on who can ride their Mack coaster. So yes, the incident in Orlando is now affection operations of other Mack coasters.
Well that's a sham restriction if I've ever seen one. This incident had nothing to do with evacuations from a lift hill. They're only using that as an arbitrary point of reference in order to prevent all disabled guests from riding. Not very transparent of them.
They’re not educated guesses when we don’t even know where the fatal injuries occurred.
I don't disagree--that the rationale is not very transparent. But it seems, likely inside of Mack and some parts of the amusements community, there may be an emerging belief that the Mack coaster may not have been designed well for some ADA riders. So it looks like the wording is just an excuse to remove many ADA riders from the England coaster until there's more information. And for clarity, I'm taking a guess at corporate motivation here based on the new restrictions publicly announced. I'm also guessing that such restrictions are also the necessary cover that the UK and European parks need to demonstrate their commitment to safety and to minimize legal exposure if an accident were to happen there.
You can say that with multiple WDW theme parks also if a ride goes down. DHS has 9 rides, AK right now has even less rides than DHS. Also Epcot also has 11 rides. There is no excuse for those three WDW theme parks having low ride totals unlike Epic Universe considering new theme parks usually have expansion plots.
“ADA rider” is not a true category of rider. The restriction is on persons incapable of using stairs without assistance. They don’t have the ADA in England and the ADA addresses far more than mobility impairments.
