OMG 10/12/2013

There's really no such thing as bad press.

"You are, without a doubt, the worst pirate I've ever heard of"

"But you HAVE heard of me..."

Staaber said:
Well, here in C-Town CP is getting a lot of bad press....so I hope they plan to better this in the future....

What do you propose? Having blimps pick up cars in the parking lot and deposit them on the Interstate? Building a 2nd (or even 3rd) causeway? Perhaps giving out rubber pontoons and paddles so people could row their cars across the bay to Sandusky?

Cedar Point is on a, GASP, point. There are 2 exits from it. How do you propose they "plan to better this in the future?" Bitching is cheap. Getting more exits from Cedar POINT is not.

hmmmm....maybe Miller Ferry could take vehicles back and forth from the peninsula and mainland?

(just kidding)

I saw someone say on that news article that after being stuck in the parking lot, when they finally got on the causeway, there was "no one on it" after being in the parking lot for hours. Why wasn't anyone moving before the causeway?

There has to be a way to improve for extremely busy times, many have made suggestions here for example, opening up the causeway to exit only for times like this and direct pick-ups to use the chaussee road. Spend the money on professional traffic controllers with experience. Someone else mentioned how their line wasn't being let out at regular intervals.

A couple people have said they should have been turned away.

I think this comment sums up the impression that people are getting:

"They packed all of us in like sardines, knowing that the day would be miserable for all....and they didn't even care, they got their money!"

If Cedar Point doesn't have the complaints in their face they won't have the desire to improve something.

e x i t english said:
There's really no such thing as bad press.

And this is directed to ScottyF too.

Just go ahead and call up Six Flags over Texas and see what their PR people have to say about "Any press is good press" when they had to deal with lady who fell out of the NewTexas Giant coaster and died...

I think they would call your comments asinine to put it politely...

3snoH un=l said:
I saw someone say on that news article that after being stuck in the parking lot, when they finally got on the causeway, there was "no one on it" after being in the parking lot for hours. Why wasn't anyone moving before the causeway?

opening up the causeway to exit only for times like this and direct pick-ups to use the chaussee road

In what world do these quotes co-exist? If the problem is before the causeway, how does doing anything on the causeway solve anything?

Spend the money on professional traffic controllers with experience.

Who has more experience than the CP people who have been directing traffic all summer?

Someone else mentioned how their line wasn't being let out at regular intervals.

That means another "Someone Else" had their line being let out at shorter than regular intervals. Is your plan to slow down those people so the original "someone else" get out quicker? Seems rather zero-sum to me.

If Cedar Point doesn't have the complaints in their face they won't have the desire to improve something.

And your suggestion to "improve somethng" (other than getting "in their face") is change things on a causeway that you claim "has no one on it," paying more for people who have less experience in the CP lot than the people they have now (but are "professional") and changing the numbers in a zero-sum equation?

Perhaps a solution that involves more than two exits from a point jutting out into a lake would be helpful. Harder than getting "in their face," but waaaayyyy more useful.

Captain Hawkeye said:

Staaber said:
Well, here in C-Town CP is getting a lot of bad press....so I hope they plan to better this in the future....

What do you propose? Having blimps pick up cars in the parking lot and deposit them on the Interstate? Building a 2nd (or even 3rd) causeway? Perhaps giving out rubber pontoons and paddles so people could row their cars across the bay to Sandusky?

Cedar Point is on a, GASP, point. There are 2 exits from it. How do you propose they "plan to better this in the future?" Bitching is cheap. Getting more exits from Cedar POINT is not.

It's called turning people away and not worrying about making as much $$$ as they can in one day...stop being so damn greedy......when is enough enough??? You can't tell me they haven't made enough $$ already this year....

I don't know how you deal with the multiple quotes feature, other than copy paste numerous times.

Are you really saying it's hopeless? Really?

I'm not going to repeat myself and say it a different way but still the same.

CP should track their busiest days. Sounds like it's July 4th, Labor Day Saturday, and Columbus Day Saturday to me and they should plan accordingly expecting the crowds with all hands on deck.

Opening up four lanes of traffic out would help in directing parking lot traffic to each of those four points, multiple exit lines from different areas of the parking lot.

If CP did come up with a plan for next year and it went a lot smoother and faster then it really wasn't as hopeless as you are saying. We'll see then, won't we? I'll be saying glad you weren't in charge to figure it out.

How awful that a for-profit company is greedy!

joncars05 said:

e x i t english said:
There's really no such thing as bad press.

And this is directed to ScottyF too.

Just go ahead and call up Six Flags over Texas and see what their PR people have to say about "Any press is good press" when they had to deal with lady who fell out of the NewTexas Giant coaster and died...

I think they would call your comments asinine to put it politely...

My comments were asinine, but that doesn't make them untrue, plus, you act as if I made up the rules about how humans digest news.

Also, call it what you want, but that fat woman got a whole lot of people talking about that Texas coaster, that park, and theme parks in general. As crappy as it may seem to you and her family, just like the CP parking thing, it nets awareness and hopefully better policies and procedures like...don't let fat people ride rides they shouldn't, or don't let people in the park when it's "full."

Staaber said:
It's called turning people away and not worrying about making as much $$$ as they can in one day...stop being so damn greedy......when is enough enough??? You can't tell me they haven't made enough $$ already this year....

Would not a simpler and better solution be to NOT GO TO THE PARK ON WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS WILL BE ONE OF THE BUSIEST DAYS OF THE YEAR?

That way those who do not want to deal with traffic jams can avoid them and those who are willing to put up with them can enjoy the park.

I'm not saying it's 100% hopeless but since CP is on a point, unless they build another causeway, the park has to drain through 2 exits. (And the hotel parking lots & the Soak City lot have 1 road to use to get to those exits!) Possibly some things can be done around the margins, but draining X thousand cars through 2 exits can only be done so quickly. If you open "up four lanes of traffic out" what happens at the end of the causeway when you have to narrow those 4 lanes to two? Or does the city of Sandusky change streets to one way? It is zero-sum: at some point you have to narrow down to the number of lanes on a city street. Not to mention that you still have all of the back lots draining through 1 road, and a limited number of exits from the main lot to the causeway and Cedar Point Rd. You can relocate the bottle necks, but, unless CP's geography changes, it is still a peninsula.

BTW, why do you think CP didn't have "all hands on deck?" Or at least all hands they could get to work on a beautiful October holiday weekend. They knew it would be one of their busiest days.

How do you know they didn't have all available hands?

Also, you can only throw so many bodies at a problem before your returns diminish.

Paisley said:
There were actually a few times pre-webcam that my husband and I got there, saw that cars were parked in the grass by the chausee because the lot was full, and just turned around and left.

Thank you. I've been going for almost 40 years and the few times I've seen this (cars on the grass), I've turned around and left. It doesn't get worse than that with the parking situation. I witnessed this a few times back in 1994 (Raptors opening year). I knew not to go on this past Saturday after being warned that it's a notoriously bad crowded day (the Saturday before Columbus Day) but I will attempt this Saturday. Should be interesting.

Since we're doing movie quotes, I will take this one from Tomorrow Never Dies...

"There's no news... like bad news."

^^^ 3snoH un=l posted earlier "CP should track their busiest days. Sounds like it's July 4th, Labor Day Saturday, and Columbus Day Saturday to me and they should plan accordingly expecting the crowds with all hands on deck."

Which is it, "all hands on deck" or "you can only throw so many bodies at a problem before your returns diminish?"

People advocating that CP do something about heavy traffic seem to be advocating having both MORE people and having the SAME NUMBER of people working.

Anyone want to claim the delays were caused by CP having too many people working? :)

3snoH un=l said:
I saw someone say on that news article that after being stuck in the parking lot, when they finally got on the causeway, there was "no one on it" after being in the parking lot for hours. Why wasn't anyone moving before the causeway?

This is pretty common on ultra-busy days. The bottlenecks are in the parking lots (front and back). Once you break free from the lot, you're usually in the clear. The Soak City lot has one (I think?) exit point for the entire lot. The main parking lot only has a handful. And within the lot itself it's a free-for-all. There is no orderly pattern to guide you to the exit.

Disney World has a pretty efficient parking strategy, at least from my experience. Parking spaces are angled and traffic is directed in one direction to one-way roads that loop around to the exit. It doesn't eliminate traffic congestion, but there is no "everyone pick a different direction to drive" confusion.

Now, whether or not this makes sense for Cedar Point given the space and geometry of their parking lot, that's a different question.

If anyone was there in the traffic jam leaving Saturday night, I would be curious to know if they were only trying to use the "normal" 2 exit lane roads heading off Point?

My question then would be is it possible to use 3 exit lanes heading from the CP parking lot all the way to Cleveland Rd; the 2 normal right exit lanes would be designated for turning right on to Cleveland Rd. while utilizing the "3rd" additional lane for only left turns all the way up to and onto Cleveland Rd. I am sure there are other available concepts to use 3 exiting lanes which seems to be the necessity for capacity days like Saturday.

Walt, myself being a CP historian, like yourself, is there anyway for you or Jeff to "pull some strings" and get some official attendance numbers for 10/12? I know things like the official daily stats aren't usually published. I'm curious to also see the yearly total attendance after 10/27. Did the park ever go over 3.4million people? (forgot the year).
Things I'd be interested in for 10/12 are total cars in the lot, total daily attendance (season pass + paid) through all entrances, etc. One date (through research) that sticks out for me is July 4th,1963 when 54,000 people crammed the park w/over 9,000 cars (which has to have been broken since then)...I'll check some more stats. Let us know if you can some of these stats please. Much appreciated.

Walt makes some really great points about the parking situation at Cedar Point versus some parks, like Disney, who seem to have it nailed down to a science. It does seem like ever since Cedar Point eliminated the parking trams the main lot has turned into one giant free-for-all! I would implore Cedar Point executives to spend the winter coming up with something that makes sense to fix the main lot, it is so bad that I NEVER use it to park and always park in Soak City lot.

CPfan1976 said:
Walt, myself being a CP historian, like yourself, is there anyway for you or Jeff to "pull some strings" and get some official attendance numbers for 10/12?

They're pretty protective of daily numbers. Sometimes a friend of a friend of the guy who works near another friend will say, "I heard there was xx,xxx" in the park. I'm not saying they're always wrong, but I'd view those numbers with a healthy dose of skepticism.