Live Blog Discussion

jscll said:

The screen of shame increases guest awareness about the need for fast loading...

I think you vastly overestimate the public's awareness of, well, anything when they're on vacation. It's a tool for the crew, nothing more.

http://www.cleveland.com/travel/index.ssf/2016/05/first_ride_on_ced...s_val.html

Included is a quote from Jeff

I have to respectfully disagree Jeff, mainly because other then the performance information (dispatchers per hour, time to dispatch to hit interval), the screen does not provide new information for the opperators on this particular ride. If the go-or-no-go belt is fastened, the sensor should give a positive confirmation, and there is no benefit for the ride platform crew to check a screen to see if a seat needs rechecking. From my perspective, this sort of system works. The difference on Leviathan before and after they installed a count down clock and restraint status lights was, to me, quite noticeable. I know people are at the park to have fun and leave their common sense at home, but with the exception of school groups, most people hate waiting in a long line, and will go out of their way to make sure no one can blame for a hold up.

On the other hand, maybe my faith in human kind is misplaced, and I only surround myself with people who believe in efficiency.

Wait, how long the train has been sitting there and which seats aren't locked isn't valuable information to the ride operators? Seriously? Because having the person at controls shout seat numbers and dwell time is more efficient?

If the ride attendants ensure all of the go-or-no-go belts on Valravn are fastened, there should rarely be a circumstance where the harness is not down far enough. The rare cases where the belts are fastened, but the ride says the harness is not down far enough, would be caused by a belt being too long (possibly stretched), or sensor failure. Both of these are issues that should be resolved by maintenance by the next day.

And I do agree, on rides like B&M hypers, the screens do help the attendants to find restraints not down enough latch points, but little lines by the floor that wear off is not nearly as easy to see as if a no-go belt is buckled.

My point being, so long as the attendants physically check to make sure all the belts are fastened on Valravn, and so long as the ride is in proper working order (and properly sized no-go belts), the attendants will never need to recheck seats, and therefore a harness status readout provides no new information to the ride crew, with the sole exception of if there is a problem (which should be incredibly rare). (And if the seat is giving problems, it needs to be removed from service until it is repaired.)

Jeff Said:

[H]ow long the train has been sitting there ... isn't valuable information to the ride operators?

And I did previous state that Valravn's screen of shame will probably give "...the performance information (dispatchers per hour, time to dispatch to hit interval)." I probably should have more simply said "count down clock". (I presume it will have this information, but I have only seen one picture of the display and I cannot read the words.) My argument here only applies to harness status.

Hopefully I gave an understandable, if not long argument why I believe the harness status readout will be of incredibly little use to the ride crew on Valravn. If I sound like a rambling idiot, I apologize, and maybe someone else will be able to present my argument better.

I think you should spend some time as a ride operator. When there are releases and rechecks, instances of people that don't fit, variation on how each op overlaps, etc., knowing at a glance where a recheck is necessary without seeing every seat is valuable. And dwell time is even more important for a crew trying to make interval.

*bangs his head on the desk*

I was a ride operator for a season on Hydra, The Revenge. I am proud to say I worked with one of the best ride crews in the park, we rarely stacked trains. And that ride has loose item bins.

And every ride operator is responsive for checking their assigned seats, there should never be any seats not checked. If the ride crew is too incompetent to check their assigned seats, the crew has problems, and this safety issue needs to be resolved before the crew can worry about hitting interval. No data output can make an incompetent crew operate safely. And if a guest does not fit in their seat on Valravn, the go-or-no-go belt will not fasten, and therefore the ride crew should not need to hunt for a harness not down far enough.

And why are we arguing over how valuable a dispatch clock is. I already acknowledged twice that this is a valuable piece of information.

But I digress, we are terribly off topic.

So now you're arguing for something it isn't for instead of arguing that it's for guests.

How about with something like this new board the Ride Hosts can see, they skip physically checking harnesses and just do a quick visual check of each row as they pass by? That would really speed up the dispatch process.

That would be logical but probably won't work that way. They would still yank on the seat belts to make sure they are buckled correctly, so that in itself would require visiting each seat.

jscll said:

I hope the park adopts a no preferred seat approach like Fury 325. It makes the station experience much less hectic, and if the turnstile attendant is any good, the ride should average less than one empty seat per train.

Are you saying they should tell the guests which row to go to? If so, that is one of my biggest pet peeves that parks do.

They do assign rows on Valravn. I dont know how they could not do that and be efficient with the ride. Allowing people to choose what row they wanted to go would lead to a mess in the small station.

Maverick00 said:

Are you saying they should tell the guests which row to go to? If so, that is one of my biggest pet peeves that parks do.

I use to hate this way of operating a coaster but now that I care more about my wait time, I'm all for it. Seeing how fast and efficient Disney is with loading because of platform attendants really makes me wish more parks did this. Almost every time if you want a particular row they will accommodate you and your party as I have asked plenty of times at parks all over and they always oblige.

One thing I can't stand though is when they assign seats AND they still are sending out tons of empties because the person at crowd control can't fill all the shoots fast enough. Saw this happening a lot with Intimidator and Fury at Carowinds so it was the worst of both worlds. Wait was longer than it should have been and no choice of seats. When I used to work Magnum, we'd have the load side hosts pair up single riders at the train and the crowd person simply controlled the number of people on the platform and we'd prefer to keep a few trains of people up there - enough to have a pool of riders to fill empty seats, but not so much that there were people crammed all the way to the back wall. Now they don't let the load side hosts walk up and down between trains (they have to stand on dots) so it can't be done this way.

It seems like the best is to allow people to wait for the front and maybe the back and assign everything in between, but that probably wouldn't work out well on a dive coaster with 8 across seating and only three rows so I think assigning everything will work best and is likely for Valravn.

Definitely. There are only three rows, and it's a lot harder to see if there are 8 people in the row compared to 2. Assigning seats I suspect will be ideal. They do have a longer queue for the front, so hopefully they'll use that.

It seems to me, that if any coaster had a dedicated 'single rider' line, it would be perfect for Valravn.