Cedar Point Shores/Ride Line Closings

I avoid CP like the plague for the first few weeks of operation because they're notoriously bad in both crew performance and ride uptime. This has been the case for many years now.

I also don't claim that they're perfect, but I get around to a lot of parks every year, and CP is consistently the top performer outside of Disney in my experience.

The flats can be hit or miss -- there's this one guy at Cedar Downs who clearly has no interest in being there -- but the coasters are almost always stellar once the crews hit their groove.

I am all for giving a seasonal park a bit of time to iron the kinks at the start of each season and have never expected anything close to seamless operations or 100% uptime the years I have gone up for Opening Day/Weekend. But Cedar Point seems to lose a quarter of each season to a terrible start each year. That's not acceptable, especially for a park of that caliber.

Kings Island often has an Opening Day where the park is already operating at 80% of its potential as far as ride crews, uptime, efficiency, etc, and is usually at 100% by week 2 or 3. These days, Cedar Point seems to start the season at like 35% on Opening Weekend, hits 60-70% by Memorial Day and caps out around 85% during the height of summer season.

I’ve yet to see Gemini not stack with a hard stop this year. I get that with IROC, bins , gates, seatbelts, accessibly, etc we will never see 3 trains and 50 second dispatches again, but all that shouldn’t equal 4 minutes dispatches nearly every time.

Same with Raptor. nothing has changed on that ride in 20 years in terms of bins, gates, and seatbelts, but the interval for that has almost doubled. It stacks all 3 almost every time.

On the flip side I’ve seen Magnum, Gatekeeper, and Steel vengeance hit their interval more times than not with crews that absolutely hustle and seem to care.

It’s somewhat bizarre the difference in operations from ride to ride. Some operate close enough to pre-IROC that that can’t be the only reason. Magnum was pretty dreadful 3-4 years ago but last 2 years have been great. I think there is a culture thing and I hope the leaders on those crews make their way up, or maybe someone from an earlier era can come back and shake things up. If there is something operational wise that can help crews succeed more often (staffing, bin removal, etc) hopefully that can be addressed as well.

From what I'm reading here, this sounds like there are zone supervisors who really know how to train crews and ones that don't. Some things never change..........

I wouldn't say that nothing has change. For the rides, maybe, but it's clear to me that for some reason people now much carry around an epic amount of crap all of the time. I can't even imagine carrying a backpack around a park all day, but here we are.

El Toro Ryan has a new Problematic Coasters episode that goes into Millennium Force’s capacity problems.

Even when the park was near empty in 2020, they still were stacking all of the trains on Raptor and Gatekeeper every time. The trains weren't even going out fully loaded, so it didn't seem to be a loose articles thing.

Steel Vengeance crew is phenomenal, though. Even when that line is long I don't mind it so much because it moves quickly.

Also, WTF is IROC?

https://ridetraining.com/iroc/about-iroc/