WDW's Space Mountain is REALLY bad

[Twirlnhurl]

I do have one more fear on space mountain (both Florida and California) - Disney does not enforce loose articles like other parks do, and since the tracks wind over and under each other, the possibility of a phone or other object falling and hitting someone is definitely on my radar.

Space really should be enforced universal / cedar point style but that’s another issue.

After what happened 2 days ago at Kings Island due to some one losing their keys on a coaster, I feel the no loose articles policy should an industry wide policy.

That’s true, injuries from falling objects are preventable injuries and I wouldn’t feel strongly one way or another if all roller coasters started making you secure loose belongings.

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]

do not have significant enforcement on rides with high sides such as Mummy, Flight of the Hippogriff, and Gringotts.

Those do not cross over tracks below that have active trains - very different.

 

[Chef Mickey]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

That doesn't really cost much and I'd agree with it, just bc people are idiots.

 

[bwr827]

That’s true, injuries from falling objects are preventable injuries and I wouldn’t feel strongly one way or another if all roller coasters started making you secure loose belongings.

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.

 

[Jrb1979]

I just googled the incident; a guy lost his keys and then enter 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.

Not directly a falling object injury but would have been avoided if he had to put his keys in a locker before hand.

 

[Twirlnhurl]

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.

 

[TrainsOfDisney]

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.

That’s not how risk management / insurance agents do math haha

 

[C33Mom]

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.

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]

That’s not how risk management / insurance agents do math haha

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]

It has probably been 7-8 years since I rode it last and at the time I didn't want to ride it again since it was so uncomfortable and painful....

recently I've been hanging out with a friend who's never been to WDW before, so we've been going around the parks, she convinced me she wanted to try Space Mountain and I told her in advance it's not in great condition.

I made the mistake of riding it and wow, it's MUCH worse than I remember it. Now I'm not a young, skinny person, I'll admit, but even so, it was super painful and not fun. She also was in pain and had a headache the rest of the day after riding it (she's ok now).

I know they were going to replace the track 10-15 years ago then cheapened out...then I was HOPING they'd let the opening of TRON give them a reason to close and re-track Space Mountain, but that still hasn't happened.

I wonder how many complaints Guest Relations gets daily about it.

On this note, I have also been on the Matterhorn a few times and yes, it is also quite jarring and rough, however one difference is I can actually see and anticipate the turns/drops, etc. and brace for them. Space Mountain is so dark (especially with the changes to make it more dark) that it surprises you.

I know some people still love it, but sorry, I can't ride it again unless they make major changes to it. I'll happily ride the Anaheim one instead.

I'm a 68 year old male and rode it a few months ago. I thought it was fine and had no problems.

 

[meteorwave]

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.

 

[Lilofan]

To be fair, Disney hotel rooms are never cool enough - even with the overriding AC hack.

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]

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.

 

[TrainsOfDisney]

All until something breaks they cant fix easily or someone gets hurt.

Pressure era all over again sadly

 

[TalkToEthan]

Pressure era all over again sadly

not sure if that was typo or intentional but “Pressure” works well enough regardless.

 

[TrainsOfDisney]

not sure if that was typo or intentional but “Pressure” works well enough regardless.

Haha! Auto correct for the win. Meant “Pressler” era.

 

[Chef Mickey]

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.

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.

 

[JMcMahonEsq]

Putting that ride in Epcot was a mistake. There’s no need for anything similar at MK.

Under what set of reasoning is building a brand new coaster attraction that seems very popular, and is based off a unique to WDW ride system, and putting it in the one park that did not provide any type of coaster based ride a mistake?