What they’re working on for 2020

Thirsty Pony is cool. The wings are from Frickers and I've always liked those, they're whole wings.

I hate to bust up the fond memories of lost Columbus Tiki joints, but a friend of mine posted some photos of the park on Facebook today. I'm not going to link them because I'm fairly certain he shouldn't have been where he was, but I did see something of note that I thought I'd share.

The was quite a large crane positioned next to Steel Vengeance, right of the perimeter road. Not large enough to work on the lift hill, but too large to be used for removing the trains from the ride. It seemed perfectly positioned to work on the inversion that goes through the lift structure.

Is this merely some typical off-season maintenance? Could the rumors of them having trouble with that section shaking too much be true? Will Myles Garrett and Mason Rudolph ever be friends? We can only speculate.

operative_me said:

Will Myles Garrett and Mason Rudolph ever be friends? We can only speculate.

Mason did say that he has no ill will toward MG and respects Myles' abilities as a defensive player (or something along those lines). I don't think that qualifies as them being 'friends', but it's at least something...

What they're working on for 2020, I guess this can be posted here; I drove the Chausee Sunday and noticed they are dismantling he large water tower at about block #7. You can actually see it quite clearly from the causeway.

Photos floating around on facebook and someone said they took out more trees right by the tolls before entering the parking lot? Anyone know what they could be doing?

^Installing footers for the turn around of the 500' tall RMC t-Rex of course!

jk. They announced improvements to getting into and out of the park. So one can assume it has to do with that. A re-design of the tolls. Hopefully including gold/platinum pass self scan booths like at KI.

I'm sure more details will be revealed at Winter Chill Out.

jimmyburke said:

...they are dismantling he large water tower...

Which water tower?

^Brandon, the water tower along the Chausee at about block #7 behind the homes, silver. When using that road to enter CP you could tell you were about half way there when passing the water tower. Of course, that will no longer be a factor as they will prohibit/restrict CP traffic that way.

Glad to hear it sounds like the toll booth area is being reworked. That was the area that stood out to me as the best thing to stick a band-aid on to temporarily remedy the parking problems. It's a relatively cheap option to increase the flow in and out of the park. While capacity will remain virtually unchanged, it should help alleviate the backups stretching from the booths to Cleveland Rd.

A new building has been erected at the main toll booth area, likely to replace that larger main booth/building on the left side. It is approx. 200' north of that existing booth/building and looks to be about twice as large, brown siding like the season pass center area. To the left of that section of the roadway toward the bay is an area with some utility structures and where they store some park equipment that is also in construction mode.

This is an update that has been a long-tome coming, and I'm happy to see it finally happening. Aside from adding a lane or two to the causeway, this is the best way to help traffic flow to and from the park.

So by what you're describing, the new developments are happening about a Magnum (see what I did there) further up into the existing lot area?

I hope the current booths are demolished and replaced with newer ones with more lanes. The current booths look so outdated. Hopefully they make it like Kings Island's tollbooths.

In my opinion, I don’t know how much of a redo for the tollbooths will effect the traffic flow. All traffic will still bottleneck down to 2 lanes at the end of the causeway.

Imagine something more on the scale of what Kings Island has. This is from memory, but I believe they have about 12 or 13 booths, with some of them being dedicated to pass holders that you can self-scan yourself into. They could also increase the lanes at the end if it is indeed being pushed up a Magnum north of the current stopping point.

It sounds like they are re-imagining the whole system.

In my very limited experience on severely backed up days, the problems I encountered were not getting through the tollbooths per see but the traffic jam after the booths that was piled up due to the cross traffic and left/right turn to get on to Perimeter preventing cars from pulling through the tollbooths. 100 toll booths are not going to solve that problem.

I wonder if they will eliminate the Chaussee toll booth forcing all traffic through one main bank of booths letting traffic fan out from there, funneling vehicles back down causes traffic. Just like on the highway, traffic can be backed up for miles but once you get close to the lane closure or accident traffic picks back up despite the rubber neckers.

That would indeed be an interesting choice - eliminating the ability to enter the park from the Chaussee, making it exit-only (and maybe only in extreme cases, busy days, emergencies, etc.).

Though I'm not sure how you accomplish that from a practical perspective.

DJ, you misunderstand. Not eliminate chaussee traffic from entering but if the booths are moved north, have the entering chaussee traffic routed directly to the same bank of booths (probably the right most booth) thus eliminating the cross traffic of those vehicles trying to get to the Marina/Perimeter Road.

Gotcha. But in a scenario where there is no bottleneck, such as what you describe, what reason would there be to keep allowing entry to non-residents via the Chaussee?

Mostly it would be big hassle to prevent, likely requiring yet another manned guard post on Rt. 6 or turning vehicles away making them drive all the way around, severely antagonizing guests.

I guess they could make Cedar Point Rd. a gated community if governing authorities permitted it.

I haven't used this entrance in a long time but if its still the same you will find that most of the cross traffic that comes across the main entry is from guests going to the Marina/resorts or Chausee residents using the causeway as an exit. Guests using the Chausee toll booth for main parking are turned before that point into the main lot. As long as the park allows Chausee residents to enter and then exit via the causeway as a shortcut to Sandusky, the cross traffic will never be eliminated.

TwistedWicker77 said:
In my opinion, I don’t know how much of a redo for the tollbooths will effect the traffic flow. All traffic will still bottleneck down to 2 lanes at the end of the causeway.

How do you figure it would go down to only 2 lanes if all of the booths are open & staffed for the day?