Chef Mickey
Well-Known Member
To be fair, Disney hotel rooms are never cool enough - even with the overriding AC hack.
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WDW's Space Mountain is REALLY bad
- Thread starter ChrisFL
- Start date
Twirlnhurl
Well-Known Member
I disagree. Injuries from falling objects on most rollercoasters with high-side trains are rare enough to not be worth the cost of enforcement.
Even Universal, with their extremely thurough enforcement on rides with open trains such as Hulk, VelociCoaster, and Rip Ride Rockit do not have significant enforcement on rides with high sides such as Mummy, Flight of the Hippogriff, and Gringotts. Space Mountain's trains are such that most dropped objects will fall harmlessly into the car.
Like most things in life, the optimal amount of a bad thing is usually not zero.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Those do not cross over tracks below that have active trains - very different.
Chef Mickey
Well-Known Member
People struggle a lot with "how much safety" is enough. If even 1 person dies, they want complete change at any cost. While sad, this is usually unreasonable and sometimes comes with secondary impacts that end up doing the opposite of the intent.
To give a real world example, imagine a child either died or was injured from turbulence on a plane. This airline decided all kids over 2 must buy their own ticket and sit in a seat with a seatbelt. The airline would avoid any injury/death from turbulence. Yay! Case cloesd, right? Wrong.
What is the secondary impact? Now, some families would not be able to incur the cost of the extra plane ticket and would drive instead, incentivizing more people to drive to destinations and ultimately a few to be killed in car accidents because driving is so much less safe than flying.
This doesn't necessarily apply to this case, but the line of thinking that "more is better" is not always true or economically feasible. We could probably fit airplanes with exotic airbags and save 1-2 more lives in plane crashes too.
Jrb1979
Well-Known Member
I agree with most of what you said in general. When it comes to parks I see no issues with what Universal does for most of their coasters. Everything goes into lockers and after the death of the guy at Kings Island, I strongly feel it needs to become an industry wide policy. Too many people aren't responsible enough to secure all loose articles.
Chef Mickey
Well-Known Member
That doesn't really cost much and I'd agree with it, just bc people are idiots.
bwr827
Well-Known Member
I just googled the incident; a guy lost his keys and then entered a restricted area to retrieve them, and got hit by the coaster. So not at all a falling object injury…
Re: Space Mountain, I’m intrigued by the idea of staying as loose as possible. Maybe it is still rideable.
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Jrb1979
Well-Known Member
Not directly a falling object injury but would have been avoided if he had to put his keys in a locker before hand.
Twirlnhurl
Well-Known Member
I could not disagree more. Nobody accidentally enters a restricted area in a modern amusement park. If you want to argue for lockers and their associated costs, use better examples like the tragedy at Dueling Dragons back in 2010.
Before you say that Universal's locker strategy has no costs, let's try to quantify things a bit:
If you do lockers well like VelociCoaster or Tron, the facility cost is probably at least $250/sf, so maybe $500,000 total for the locker room ($250*2,000sf=500,000).
The operations cost might be something like the cost of labor of an additional five people for the life of the ride. So maybe another $500,000 per year ($33,000 salary * 3 to get the fully burdened cost of the employee * 5 for five employees = $495,000.)
If a park ticket is $100 and each guest visits for 10 hours, that means each minute of a guest's time is worth about 17 cents. If the locker adds 3 minutes to each guests wait for the ride and 1,000 guests see the ride in an hour, that works out to $500/hour of guest time incurred by the lockers. For a park open 10 hours a day all year, that works out to be a cost of an additional $1.8 million a year.
How many lives would need to be saved by the lockers to make those costs worth while? If it is worth spending $10 million to save one life, that would mean the lockers would need to prevent a death every five years.
There is no way the danger even comes close to that. Lockers may be worth it at VelociCoaster (I am skeptical, but at least that ride probably would make stuff fall out), but Space Mountain definitely hasn't killed someone every five years because of its lack of lockers.
Before you say that Universal's locker strategy has no costs, let's try to quantify things a bit:
If you do lockers well like VelociCoaster or Tron, the facility cost is probably at least $250/sf, so maybe $500,000 total for the locker room ($250*2,000sf=500,000).
The operations cost might be something like the cost of labor of an additional five people for the life of the ride. So maybe another $500,000 per year ($33,000 salary * 3 to get the fully burdened cost of the employee * 5 for five employees = $495,000.)
If a park ticket is $100 and each guest visits for 10 hours, that means each minute of a guest's time is worth about 17 cents. If the locker adds 3 minutes to each guests wait for the ride and 1,000 guests see the ride in an hour, that works out to $500/hour of guest time incurred by the lockers. For a park open 10 hours a day all year, that works out to be a cost of an additional $1.8 million a year.
How many lives would need to be saved by the lockers to make those costs worth while? If it is worth spending $10 million to save one life, that would mean the lockers would need to prevent a death every five years.
There is no way the danger even comes close to that. Lockers may be worth it at VelociCoaster (I am skeptical, but at least that ride probably would make stuff fall out), but Space Mountain definitely hasn't killed someone every five years because of its lack of lockers.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
That’s not how risk management / insurance agents do math haha
Having had to user lockers at Uni, I can tell you that the amount of guest time taken is almost always over 3m (it might be accurate for Tron but at least it’s in the queue so you don’t really lose the time on the load side), and I would guess that there are at least 2 and maybe more than 4 employees purely for locker assistance at Tron at all time (you lose more time at Uni trying to find an available locker and flagging down cast if there’s a problem).
Twirlnhurl
Well-Known Member
That's probably why Universal does it. But I believe my math is how departments of transportation make decisions about what safety features to use. Personally, I think it gets better outcomes, as it more realistically takes the costs of intervention into account, so less effort is wasted avoiding rare outcomes (while common outcomes are adequately mitigated against).
graphite1326
Well-Known Member
I'm a 68 year old male and rode it a few months ago. I thought it was fine and had no problems.
meteorwave
New Member
- In the Parks
- Yes
Space Mountain (SM) has a similar problem to The Matterhorn over at Disneyland. The ride was built during a period of time, when clearances and walkways could be much smaller than today. Take a look at Disney's newest coasters and see how much they've ballooned in size. While Tron seems short, it has a slightly longer track than SM. But SM seems like a longer ride. Tron only has one track, while there are two identical layouts of SM in the same building. The Tron show building is huge.
If Space Mountain was completely rebuilt, its unlikely it would be built with the identical layout. There would have to be tons of modifications made to the trains, the track, and the support structure. SM is essentially a working antique at this point. I always heard that if Matterhorn was rebuilt using today's construction standards, it would triple the size of the attraction. This is probably the case for SM as well.
If Space Mountain was completely rebuilt, its unlikely it would be built with the identical layout. There would have to be tons of modifications made to the trains, the track, and the support structure. SM is essentially a working antique at this point. I always heard that if Matterhorn was rebuilt using today's construction standards, it would triple the size of the attraction. This is probably the case for SM as well.
If it is a motion detector AC unit did you try the balloon trick ? Tie a balloon to a chair by the AC vent to create constant motion to keep the AC running.
ppete1975
Well-Known Member
I think they are kicking the can down the road knowing that when its closed it will be closed a long time. It needs a new track and prob alot of updates. And I am sure they are using the excuse of they dont have capacity... wait till tron opens, wait till splash/tiana opens.. ok wait till big thunder is back running.. then it will be something else.
All until something breaks they cant fix easily or someone gets hurt.
All until something breaks they cant fix easily or someone gets hurt.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Pressure era all over again sadly
TalkToEthan
Well-Known Member
Pressure era all over again sadly
not sure if that was typo or intentional but “Pressure” works well enough regardless.
TrainsOfDisney
Well-Known Member
Haha! Auto correct for the win. Meant “Pressler” era.
Chef Mickey
Well-Known Member
I tried it and it seems hit or miss. Really terrible. Maybe it's too dark?
The one AC that was good was the new Swan Reserve which I stay bc of my Marriott status.