Next Defunct Attractions

Corkscrew may be good enough, meet numbers but it's hardly iconic at this point. Has anyone seen a full train roll through those corkscrews recently? I can't think of a time in the last 10 years. It's become kind of depressing because I remember how much I loved standing there as a kid. Actually riding it is even more depressing, it's easily the least comfortable ride in the park. I say if they preserve the layout at all, replace it with a cheap modern vendor's track, might even be able to reuse the supports.

RMC corkscrew

We can sell just half the house at the theater and make a tidy profit. Rides can run without filling every seat and still attract enough riders to remain.

JohnMosesBrowning said:

I find complaints about “uncomfortable” coasters curious. Is it an age issue? Seriously. I’m 61 & grew up when coaster comfort was never even a consideration. Have folks been exposed to too many smooth coasters?

Probably. Coasters have improved quite a lot in the last few decades, both in terms of train comfort (with some notable exceptions) and especially design and fabrication, which makes them significantly smoother.

This is why I am not especially attached to CS. Yeah, it's historic I suppose, but so is the Model T. And while it's cool to marvel at a Model T in a museum, I wouldn't want pay money to take a road trip in one.

RyanRSheets said:

Has anyone seen a full train roll through those corkscrews recently?

Yes! I have many times.

^I was about to reply with the same thing.

There's quite alot most people do miss in the parks when they don't look. My season, it was quite common to send full trains most of the morning and into the afternoon. Think with families, this is a smaller ride than some of the others, so alot of families flock over for it. Plenty of days during the season families would wait with their kids for the rope drop on our ride.

Next defunct attractions:

Dinos Alive, Frontier Fling, Antique cars. Just my opinion.

Seeing full trains is as useless as seeing empty trains, as far as determining popularity.

CS' location would be ideal for a wild mouse in my opinion. Compact, highly visible from the midway, and fits the bill for a smaller "starter" coaster.

^^That there. Any reports here of going to the park X number of days during the season and not seeing Y number of people on a ride is anecdotal. I don't pretend to know the numbers Cedar Fair is looking at, but it seems reasonable to me to assume the company is monitoring ridership and using those numbers to inform decisions about whether a ride should be removed or not.

It's like working a second shift job, going to a 24 hour grocery store at 2 in the morning, and saying it's not a successful store because it's never busy.

I can see a wild mouse as a great addition to the park.

There was a (wild) mouse in the dorms one year...it did not go over well at all!

djDaemon said:

And they have always removed rides that don't meet their internal popularity criteria.

Please cite the statistics or data used to make this blanket statement.

Do you have access to CP's internal popularity data for each ride?

I guess the simplistic way to look at it would be ridership.

Or you could look at ridership vs staffing and maintenance costs and location and foot traffic and a bunch of other factors.

Or, you could look at crowd patterns within the park and see which areas need more traffic to determine the areas that would benefit most from investment.

MaverickLaunch said:

Please cite the statistics or data used to make this blanket statement.

Do you have access to CP's internal popularity data for each ride?

No, but I can read.

Rob Decker via AV Club:

"What I like to say is that guests tend to vote with their feet. We keep a good sense of how people are using the park, experiencing the park, and what their tendencies are. We get a little bit critical about that, because if there are rides that cost us a lot of maintenance money and the ridership is very low, that’s a pretty easy formula."

Bryan Edwards via Akron Beacon Journal:

"Edwards said the theatre was in need of expensive repairs to its roof and all decisions at the park are dictated by guest expectations as “guests vote with their feet.”

“It was just a valuable piece of real estate for future growth,” he said."

Bryan Edwards via CBS Detroit:

"“We like to say our guests vote with their feet,” Edwards said. “You know, we see what rides they go and ride and which coaster they go on…"

I didn't quote anyone because I wasn't replying directly to any single post.

My bad - too many Mavericks in this thread. :-) Removed.

With Dinos leaving KI at the end of this year I have a feeling the Dinos will be the next "attraction" we see leave the park.

Next coaster? I'll throw my hat into the Corkscrew ring. And I did see it with a full queue and about a 1.5 hour wait yesterday, but a Halloweekend Saturday is definitely a different animal then a normal operating day when it comes to numbers. And if it goes, I actually wouldn't mind seeing 1 to 3 new flat rides replace it and create a "new" midway so to speak. Some of the new flats Canada's Wonderland have been installing look amazing and I would love to see them show up here, like a Mondial Top Scan, I loved the one I rode at Carowinds this year and seeing that Knott's got a custom version with increased capacity I wouldn't be shocked to see one end up at Point.

Imagine walking down that midway with 2 or 3 new well lit flats, it would be beautiful.

I've always felt Point's selection of modern flats has been kinda weak.

Removing Dinos would open up that area to bring in another attraction, or a Camp Snoopy expansion near the Resort entrance. Unless they do something really crazy and create a walking path between Frontier Trail and the Dino entrance. I don’t see it as likely though.

Where else is foot traffic weak these days? I’d probably say the Beach Entrance and Melt are pretty quiet.

^Interesting that you mentioned connecting Frontier Trail and Dino entrance area. On Friday we were on Frontier Trail near Slaughterhouse and I was thinking about a few rides on Magnum before leaving. I was actually thinking about how nice a cut through to the Gemini midway would be from halfway down FT, because the two route choices that I had were a bit lengthy for my liking at the time. Not likely to happen though.

Speaking of defunct attractions, I wish they still had Frontier Lift.

Yea, the loss of Frontier lift makes me sad. I hope they open a log flume where there is not 100% assurance that you will be drowned. That was always part of the fun to me, the trying to estimate loading patterns to get a desired amount of drowndedness. We'd get my cousin "Tiny" (he has about #200 on me) to sit in the back of WWL and we'd skip out of the drop dry as a bone at about a billionty MPH. Then when the day got hot we'd move the weight to the middle and get soaked just enough to cool off, but not enough to require a ride in the "family dryer". Interestingly, front loading seemed to just throw on the brakes really hard with minimal rider splashage, but the wall of water thrown forward was impressive.

So far the best use of the family dryer for me has been thawing out at the end of the day as a LiveE associate back in 2012 during Halloweekends. Some of those nights were astonishingly cold and wet.

WolfBobs said:

I've always felt Point's selection of modern flats has been kinda weak.

Id kill to have the flats CP has in my home park, Great Adventure. GA selection is so lacking its painful.