Lots of Cedar Point news on this week's "In the Loop" podcast

http://inthelooppodcast.com/ the May 14th episode.

Much talk about Cedar Point using a new private company to insure rider safety which has changed some critical policies regarding ride certification. The new procedures require the park to increase the number of testing cycles before opening the rides for the season This likely is why Mean Streak and other coasters weren't open all or part of opening weekend.

Also new procedures that ride operators have to follow in dispatching trains. Specifically waiting for all riders to be seated before checking lap bars and belts. This slows dispatch time on stations that have bins as the operators have to wait for all passengers to store items before checking the lap bars and belts.

Also some speculation about low staffing early in the season to lessen expense of health insurance.

Found the episode pretty informative. Worth a listen.

IROC is the death of many ride operators trying to get high numbers. Its clear that they don't know (or care) the importance of hitting interval, and it's frustrating.

Ki got slammed by it worse too...new to KI this year

"Ready"

"Scan"

Yes, visual scan hit the parks

Thank you for posting the highlights.

It seems this company is similar to the company they use for lifeguards but for ride operator training. Seems to be just a couple of women, and their website mentions Shark Tank. Could be a start up company. Cedar Point had very safe, successful operations for decades, wonder what made them decide they need this company to provide training concepts?

Why would the crew have to wait until all guests were seated before starting to check restraints? How does this make the ride safer? All that would do is cause trains to stack. Who makes these decisions?!! Sorry just venting.

If that is the new policy on checking restraints, they should just get rid of all Loose Storage Boxes and go with the Lockers (Free lockers like Universal Has would be best). Otherwise, the lines are going to be ridiculously long at the park. Most guests take forever to store lose articles and find their seats.

Is this new company to insure ride safety just at Cedar Point (and Kings Island) or at all Cedar Fair Parks now?

After listening to the In the Loop Podcast I noticed a few interesting points. He said ride operators used to be able to skip seats when checking restraints and then return to them after. But Now have to go down the line seat by seat.... After which, he then said they have to wait until all the guests are seated and previous guests are out of the station before checking restraints. I was not there this season yet. Can anyone confirm that this is the new procedure?

These kinds of procedures strike me as arbitrary and not logical. If you impose a certain procedure, it is presumably to prevent something from happening. In order to truly measure the effectiveness, you then have to get some real world data on the number of times that it happens without the procedure in place. Even then, whatever it is that you're looking for has to be certifiably a "bad thing."

And while I'm far from an expert, I don't think I'm out of line for raising the question. I've become really familiar with the way Disney operates, and I can't think of any company that has as big of a lawsuit target on its back, or that gives as many rides in any given year. So let's compare two genuinely similar rides.

Woodstock Express and Barnstormer at Magic Kingdom are both Vekoma "roller skaters," though Woodstock is slightly longer. It has those belts that only the operator can unlock, you can't bring loose articles on the ride, and I suspect that it does 200 guests per hour at best because the dispatching is so slow. The operators physically tug on each seatbelt and lap bar.

Barnstormer runs two trains, you can bring your backpacks and whatever on the ride (there's even a pouch for your stuff), it has no seat belts, and the operators visually check that you can lift your lap bar to confirm that it's locked. Even on a shorter track, they only stack trains a little bit, and sometimes they don't stack them at all. I've clocked that ride at 700 people per hour easily, and have it on good authority that they give in excess of 3 million rides every year. On a little family coaster!

So how do you account for this? Barnstormer hasn't hurt anyone as far as I'm know. When you see two systems that are totally opposite but have the same outcome, that's pretty strange.

Has the park ever provided any insight into that difference in procedures? Would this be appropriate as an "Ask Rideman" question? I feel like Dave has addressed some of these issues before.

The sad thing is CP used to operate very much like you described the Disney ride. I don't know why someone decided that wasn't good enough. It works at Disney and it worked at CP for a long time. The lines on the flat rides moved much quicker before they came around to pull up on every lap bar, they simple said to "pull up on your lap bar to ensure it is locked".

Back in the day when Corkscrew ran three trains, I remember a crew running the ride so well on three trains that most times the incoming train didn't stop outside the station, or at the most for only a couple seconds. Now they stack with two trains. It seems like a lot of these new procedures are unnecessary and seem like they were implemented by someone trying to justify their job.

Jeff said:

So how do you account for this? Barnstormer hasn't hurt anyone as far as I'm know. When you see two systems that are totally opposite but have the same outcome, that's pretty strange.

This is one of the biggest complaints I have with everything Planet/Camp snoopy, as well as Eagles. Requiring the operator to go to every seat really kills the line. On Eagles, it's irritating to watch, even more so if you're sitting there in the last eagle, waiting for the operator to come around and allow you to get out of the seat.

And Bryansworld88, I did notice that every ride was more thorough when it came to checking (pulling hard on the straps, visually seeing the clasp, and not relying on merely tugging the strap on the side to confirm it's latched), but chalked it up to new crews. I also noticed that it was taking them longer than usual to open the swing gates to let the next people on. Usually it was one really slow straggler from the previous train. Apparently this is all part of the new protocol, which is a little disconcerting. Those seconds add up.

I wouldn't blame having to wait for every guest to sit down on IROC. My home park also follows IROC standards and I've never heard of any procedure like that. Same with 100 cycles/vehicle before opening the ride.

There's always one or two slow people in each cycle. Skip them and come back. Start checking when it looks like the majority are ready. Ride ops used to meet in the middle too so if one got hung up, the other one could pick up the slack and the interval could still be met, but I know they put the kibosh on that a few years ago. They used to walk up and down on the load side and make sure there were two of four riders per row and pair people up if necessary. Now they stand on red dots behind pillars in some cases. I guess that's why Magnum got over 2 million in 2004 and was at or over that every year previous and can't even break 1.5 now. Same for Raptor.

Use some damn common sense and the fact that your park has run safely giving hundreds of millions of rides each year for decades without incident and ignore the couple of chicks who wrote a book and made a website. Absolutely asinine and disappointing. Waiting for the entire station to clear before checking restraints? What does that accomplish?

Why doesn't Rideman start his own consulting company and certify loading procedures? At least then we'd know it was someone with a clue of how things work making up the rules. :)

Having said all that, 100 cycles per unit doesn't sound unreasonable. I'd be surprised if CP ever opened a ride with less than 100 cycles on it anyway. On Magnum or Raptor, that is under seven hours worth of cycling - that was accomplished a couple times over back in my years.

The thought behind not skipping seats is that the operator might forget to go back to that seat. And always having one operator only checking their area and not anyone else's is so that you don't have a situation where both ops think that the other's checked those seats.

In regards to these new procedures, this was something a friend and I witnessed on the Red Baron at Camp Snoopy. There was a parent assisting their kid into a ride and this was taking somewhere in the realm of about 5 minutes to get their kid buckled up. We saw the ride operator just sitting at the controls and we were a little confused. In the past the ride op would be checking restraints and just work around the parent.

So we asked. And she explained this very same procedure. She is not to check restraints until all parents have left the ride area. She can assist children if they needed help.

What took the parent so long was that they wanted to buckle their child. But the child safety belt was already fastened. So they loosened the belt as much as they could and slid their child into it and tightened the belt.

It's all pretty stupid procedures. I'm all for riding safety, but it seems every year parks (not just Cedar Point) come up with pretty ludicrous restraints that limit who can ride a ride, along with a ludicrous procedure in checking that restraint.

Guest experience....

But if they meet in the middle, it would be impossible to miss a section. Keep checking until you meet. Very simple. It would seem a consultant should be interested in efficiency and safety. IROC should incorporate some of the old CP procedures, it would make more sense.

Yea I know the thought behind it, but I don't think there's anything quantifiable to indicate there was a problem before they made the change. Also, what does it really accomplish besides make it clearer who to point the finger at? They could put a camera on every loading platform for that purpose if they really felt it necessary.

Cedar Fair is big enough with a diverse enough ride collection that they ought to be handling their own operating procedures in house. I'm all for outsourcing the things that aren't a core component of your business and others can do better/cheaper (ie ride photo, some food places, etc), but there is no way some generic boilerplate training from a couple of people with a business idea is better than the years and years of experience and data that the company has.

That is a very good point. Why would someone at the company think a couple of chicks with a website would be more competent then procedures developed from decades of experience?

Chase said:

The thought behind not skipping seats is that the operator might forget to go back to that seat. And always having one operator only checking their area and not anyone else's is so that you don't have a situation where both ops think that the other's checked those seats.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. On a coaster, this makes a number of assumptions, not the least of which is that the operator isn't paying attention, but also that it's likely that there is both a double mechanical restraint failure (belt and lap bar) and no visual check of the departing train. Even those assumptions are made on the basis that the ride could physically eject you.

This group butchered operations on corkscrew...now load has to clear from the front and can't go back and fourth. Then the train is scanned and dispatched.

I could go on and on for problems I see, but I'm on mobile, too much to type