Ridership Numbers for 2007

Michigan's Adventure Freak said:
I think that we can attribute the increase in ridership on the Cedar Point & Lake Erie Railroad to Maverick.

That is one reason in the higher number, but Managment let us keep the second train on more this season then in the past and we had about 7 more days of 2 train operation. It's scheduled to come off at 8 p.m. but we usually had to pull it at 4 or 5 before. Most days we kept it on until 8 pm or even later this season. Halloweekends really helped us, we ran 2 trains O-C on every Saturday this season. Even at that, it wasn't enough... We could have re-instated the third train on some of those Saturdays!
Maybe it will be a wakeup call to allow us to run 2 trains more, especially in June.

During my tenure at CP the CP&LE consistently had the highest

ridership figures of any attraction in the park. The Only 

other attractions that came close was the Sky Ride and the 

Frontier Lift. The CP&LE was a people moving machine, and s

still has the capacity to do it now, in spite of the fact 

management deemed the third train surplus (it was donated

to a RR museum ).A change in dispatching policy and more 

hustle on the platform would dramatically increase these

numbers.

Wow - those numbers really suck across the board. Magnum and Raptor are down over half a million rides from just a couple years ago. I really hope Bill Spehn doesn't settle for this mediocrity again this year.

It's amazing the drop in Gemini's numbers.... Before the switch from 6 train operations, that number was always in excess of 2.3 million per year. Now, with the drop to 4 train operations, they're only able to move about 1.5 million.
This coaster ran for more than 20 years with a system that was efficient, and safe! It was able to move a lot of people, usually ranking it either 1st or 2nd among all the rides.. Now, with the additional safety features (the gates, seat belts), and the switch from 6 to 4 train operations, it falls to the middle of the "high capacity" rides.

Gemini could still move 2 million (or close to it) with 4 trains if they didn't double check every seat and stack trains two out of three times! :)

Dutchman said:

During my tenure at CP the CP&LE consistently had the highest

ridership figures of any attraction in the park. The Only 

other attractions that came close was the Sky Ride and the 

Frontier Lift. The CP&LE was a people moving machine, and s

still has the capacity to do it now, in spite of the fact 

management deemed the third train surplus (it was donated

to a RR museum ).A change in dispatching policy and more 

hustle on the platform would dramatically increase these

numbers.

And operating two trains every day O-C during mid June, July and August would also help those numbers. Operating the third train on Saturday's sure pushed ridership numbers up in the early 80s. The crew was very efficient in getting passengers on and off quickly so no train ever had to wait to enter the station. Those days, the railroad also typically was number 1 in ridership.

so what is the rain policy for roller coasters since it changed

So, if I'm missing something, why DID corkscrew's ridership suddenly shoot up in 2001??

Like Topgun1993 said, I think they just switched those two numbers by accident.

I think the numbers are down for rides like Millennium because of the seat belt policy they have. I have waited in the station for almost 2 minutes waiting for a person to buckle their own seat belt. I am guilty of it sometimes myself. I don't understand why the host can't snap it?? It would certainly speed things up. At Dorney you have one try to buckle the belt, it doesn't fit, you have to get off. This has happened to me a couple of times. You try the test seat, the ride host tries to close the seat before they lock and everything works, but when it needs to it doesn't and you are asked to leave the ride.

Does anybody know if they replaced all of Millennium's belts? I know some of the belts were replace before Halloweekends started.
Also, I wonder if the hours effected total ridership, with the 7 PM closing in May. I know somebody out there has the numbers, how many operating hours was CP Down this compared to the PAst years.

Yes, overweight people...please for god's sake do not take it offensively if a CP employee asks you to sit in the test seat.

Who are you trying to kid? You are not Kate Moss obviously, and you should accept the fact that not everything is designed for people of such sizes.

Embarrassing to you? Yes...but you should know better.

Common friggin sense people...

I'm surprised by the Skyride numbers.

How often do they dispatch a cabin? Max four people per cabin, and downtime due to wind. Quite an impressive head count for that ride!

I believe they dispatch cabins on the Sky Ride every 8-10 seconds when running full capacity. I worked the Frontier Lift in 1981 and whenever we operated full capacity (40 cabins on the "wire") our dispatch time was 12 seconds. To keep within that time frame, you had to have a good loader. And to keep ride total ups, that loader had to do his best to keep the cabins as full as possible. Sometimes that wasn't always easy to do.

Did raptor always work in the rain before 2005?

What about the ridership for Mean Streak? Did it go up with the addition of Maverick? Compared to the 06 season.And these numbers are just for and estimate right because when you go through the turnstiles and the ride breaks down then it still counts or i have seen this done alot, people playing with the turnstiles and spinning them quite a few extra times??

Mean Streak's ridership went up about 7000. As for Corkscrew and CPLE in 2001, Jason's graph is correct according to CP's website numbers.

Those are actual numbers recorded and totaled for every operating day. Each time the turnstile spins, a person is recorded and reported. If that person rode or not is another story. It is possible they chickened out, were "guests of exceptional size" or the ride broke down.

On the other hand, there are also cases where the turnstile gets spun more then for a single person going through.

On the scale of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of riders each year, one or two a day doesn't make that much of a difference. Especially considering things work both positive and negative for the numbers.

At corkscrew its all about the crew.Corkscrew has a max of 2100 an hour.But new seatbelts weather procedures and the extra 20 minutes in halloweekends for the parade every day hurt Corkscrew that much more. Im glad My monster numbers held up we did good in 2006. When I was TL at Antiques in 2005 we had a great crew and the numbers show bigtime.

Well as much as it has to do with crews sometimes stacking trains and such, the policies are what continually can bring down ridership, especially in 2007. The new rain policy, which caused rides to go down in a light sprinkle, which would then another 30 minutes to get back up when the sprinkling stopped, hurt ridership drastically. Rides that used to run in light rain went down at a sneeze, and after the rain stopped, the continued cycling that in prior years took less than five minutes, took upwards of an half-hour.
Another reason for decreased numbers is running fewer ride units. Rides like Gemini which used to run 6 trains from open to close, now only one side at opening for two hours or so, running 4 trains during the day, then running only one side during last two hours or so of the day. So a ride with over 3 million in the mid-90's has been decreased to less than half, when you add in seatbelts, gates, double checking, etc.
I am a bit impressed with Magnum's numbers this year though being the top coaster in the park. After running one train for about a week and two trains for four more, the numbers rebounded quite nicely, considering the policy changes that were implemented for rain.

* Sky Ride can do 20,000 easily in a busy day. 38 cabins come to about 10 second cabin dispatches.

* Bob Wozniak left on his own accord.

* Trains ridership numbers are up this year because they counted re-rides which weren't counted last year.

* Gemini's numbers are abysmal. No way could anyone pull off a Gemini 50 let alone 100 again! :)

* Magnum's numbers were decent for running 1 train a good deal of the first weeks of June.