Fast Lane is coming to the park

What is wrong with the FL entrance just being the old Freeway entrance to the que? It says limited waiting, nothing about no waiting, so basically from the old freeway entrance it is about a 10 minute wait. 10 minutes vs. an hour plus would be considered limited in my book. As long as there is an employee there to make the merge into the regular line go smooth, i see no issue with the FL.

Paying or not, everyone should have to wait at least a few minutes, minus the VIP'ers, last time i checked waiting in line for a ride isn't going to kill anyone, especially 10 minutes. If you don't want to wait, drop the big bucks and get the VIP. Just my opinion of course!

With Maverick being the only coaster not having an old Freeway entrance, i'm sure something could be constructed.

Even if there is queue management for both the regular line and fast lane, how are we guessing this should work? Lets say the regular Millennium line has 900 people in it and fast lane has 60. At the queue management/merging point, would they let the next 20 from regular and next 20 from fast lane go, or 30 regular/10 fast lane. My thinking is, regardless of how long the fast lane line is, if the queue manager lets half from regular and half from fast lane consistently, it will effectively double the wait for the attraction for the normies.

The only way your wait time would be doubled under a 50-50 loading scenario would be if the FL and normal queues were also filled at a 50-50 rate. That won't likely be the case.

If every train is filled with an average of 4 FL riders (which may or may not be a reasonable assumption - those with experience at KI please correct me), the wait for those in the normal queue will increase by 11%. In other words, a "normie" 45 minute wait will become 50 minutes.

It's reasonable to assume that, in the absence of FL access, at least some of those FL riders would have been in line in front of you to begin with. Let's say half would be in front if you in line, while the other half would be behind. That results in your 45 minute wait becoming a 47.5 minute wait, which is less than one train dispatch cycle. That doesn't seem too bad to me.

djDaemon said:
The only way your wait time would be doubled under a 50-50 loading scenario would be if the FL and normal queues were also filled at a 50-50 rate. That won't likely be the case.

How do you figure? The 50-50 loading would double the wait regardless of the fill rate of the fast lane queue. Assuming the queue for fast lane is never empty. If they always let in 18 people from fast lane and 18 people from regular, the folks not yet to the merge point waiting in the normal line would double their wait over last year.

Said another way, unless you are assuming the fast lane line is going to be empty at some point, if it perpetually loaded at a 50-50 ratio, the wait is twice as long as it was last year (100 people from regular loading last year vs 50 from regular loading this year).

If they only allow 4 people from Fast Lane on per train, as you suggest, the fast lane line would move at 1/8th the pace of the regular line, so if it got full at all it would be a heck of a wait.

I have an idea. How about we all just wait and see.

Kyle2154 said:
Assuming the queue for fast lane is never empty.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's not valid to assume the FL queue is never empty, given the 50-50 loading rate.

Management knows how many guests are in the park at any given time, and also know how many of those guests have FL access. Knowing that mix, they could instruct crews to load accordingly. For example, if there are 15,000 guests in the park, and 1,500 of those have FL access, trains could be loaded with 1 FL guest for every 10 "normie" guest. On MF's 36-person trains, 3 or 4 of those would be FL riders.

Obviously this ignores things like "normie"/FL guest distribution throughout the park, ride popularity and so on, but it's not a bad starting point.

At Kings Island last year there was no merging of the lines. It was a let all of the Fast Lane users on the train at one time. Diamondback's regular line was litteraly brought to a stop multiple times. Hopefully they really do merge the lines together this year.

Was Cedar Point the only park in the pre-paramount Cedar Fair to have a fast pass system?

Yeah, at KI, it was let in 100% FL and 0% regular line until the FL line cleared. On the day I visited, this was no issue, as hardly anyone was using FL.

But, on Columbus Day weekend, some of the regular lines were at a complete stop with significant FL waits. Apparently an employee at a haunt was telling regular guests that the wait would essentially be until the park closed, as there were never-ending FL guests coming in.

djDaemon said:

RideMan said:
It seems to me that the best way to implement this would be to hold the queue outside the station (as has customarily been done with most of the coasters, most obviously and annoyingly on Millennium Force)...

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but are you suggesting that queue management (only allowing a few trains' worth of riders in at a time) affects capacity or operations negatively? I always considered the practice sensibly efficient. (...)

No, allowing a few trains' worth of riders in at a time is exactly the way to do it. Think of the station shotgun as a buffer, holding more than enough people to load the train. You actually want to have several trainloads in the station so that there is time for people to organize themselves into their favorite seats (if applicable), get lined up with their friends (if necessary), and otherwise take care of the normal fooling around that happens as people prepare to board the train.

For the longest time, Millennium Force attendants would only allow *one* trainload of people into the station at a time, only allowing extra people to occupy shotgun lanes for the first and last seats. This resulted in a lot of unnecessary yelling, for starters, resulted in slower train fills, and more trains going out with empty seats because with a smaller population, it was harder to pair up single riders. Wicked Twister and Maverick often have similar problems, where the queue attendant holds up the line *too* long, so that there isn't enough time for people to get from the hold point into the train, resulting in delayed dispatches.

Packing the platform (as often happens on Magnum) doesn't help. Keeping the platform empty doesn't help. But keeping a relatively small number of people on the platform...say two or three train loads, typically....works pretty well. I'm sure there's an optimum number, but I haven't even tried to figure out what that might be.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

I'm all for allowing 2 or 3 train loads worth of people in. But, the millennium station and magnum station get very hectic when they just let people fill it up completely.

RideMan said:
.... I'm sure there's an optimum number, but I haven't even tried to figure out what that might be.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

C'mon Dave - I don't believe that for a minute. You already know what the number is you just are not telling us:)

Lima News columnist expects Rich "Uncle" Pennybags to be typical Fast Lane user. :)

"You're almost to the front of the line, after two hours in the hot sun, and a fellow who looks vaguely like the guy from the Monopoly game wheels up and steps in front of you. You get to explain to your kids that, while they did indeed follow the rules and do everything right, certain people in this world are able to skip the hassles and you are not those people."

As attendees to our off-season tour know, I also wear a top hat and dive into pools of gold coins.

As for the columnist, well, he lives in Lima. He's not really qualified to criticize anything, because he lives in Lima. Seriously, does anyone actually choose to live there? It's the left armpit of Ohio (Youngstown being the other).

No I don't choose to live here. :)

Hey all. I just got woke up from my long night's sleep after hitting up Worlds of Fun's opening day. Fast Lane was in full force on all the roller coasters, even boomerang, which has the shortest line imaginable. People with these passes were able to go all the way to the pagodas for the ride, but still had to wait in the individual train-car queues. These people had such a sense of entitlement, that after skipping ahead of 200-some people, the proceeded to shove their way past the dirty proletariat inside the sheltered area in order to assure their fast lane was as fast as possible.

In my opinion, this is going to cause a lot of anger for those who wait out 90+ minute waits and watch someone with a wristband skirt past in seconds, but I do understand that the pass-holders have paid a premium for the right to look and act like a spoiled brat.

I think that the Fast Lane is a good premium feature to sell, provided that they minimize the impact to the guests who choose to not get it. However, from everything that I have read about how it has been implemented at the other parks leads me to be concerned that it will have a noticeable negative impact on the guests who don't have it.

I really don't think that I will be too upset with people using FastLane unless they are going to be marathoning the rides.I go Cedar Point plenty of times with my Platinum Pass that I will get on all of the rides numerous times throughout the season. And it will not bug me too much if I have to wait a few extra minutes because of the FastLane users. I will be mad however if it turns into an extra 45min+ wait.

I do have faith in the system and believe that it will work without causing many issues. Even if there are issues at first, I am sure that Mr. Matt Q will try to fix the issues as soon as possible.

I'm thinking of doing an experiment. Have 1 person stay in the regular line, while another marathons the same ride as much as he can while the other is still in the main line. I am very interested in seeing the Ratio between the two...

You buy the pass and I'll be the marathoner while you wait in line. I just wanna help. :)