Read the Six Flags-sponsored safety studies for yourself

Granted the studies were funded by Six Flags, but the credentials of the 2 groups should be strong enough to offset any implied bias. I hope this will shut Markey up.

Mike

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Laugh your troubles away at Riverview, the world's largest amusement park.

Nothing will shut Markey up... but maybe this information will allow some people to make their own decisions based upon actual facts that they can see for themselves.

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-Rob

my neuro says that coasters are NOT known to cause brain damage or other injuries. heck, he even ENCOURAGES me to ride them because the adrenaline is GOOD for me!!

take THAT, Markey!!!

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formerly known as servo3000...mela en coiamin Legolas

All markey is concerned about is increasing the size and scope of government so it infringes into every part of American life. This is meant to allow government more power to regulate business and he has no concern for the safety of everyone!!
If he was concerned about safety he would propose controlling senator kennedy from his own state!!!

Wow, there is some good reading there.

While looking through those reports, It kept making me think about how ignorant people are that actually believe that rollercoasters kill.

Looking through, the AANS survey is the medical perspective, assuming coaster behave like airplanes, with long-duration G events.

The Exponent survey is the engineering perspective, treating coasters as both long-duration plane-like events and more discrete, auto-impact situations. Both views are generally appropriate. The Head Injury Criteria [HIC] inclusion is interesting. I wish I knew more about the provided G-data, though.

The AANS came across as more neutral, but both seem to be backed factually pretty well.

For a college English class, I have chosen the argumentative topic of rollercoaster safety as my depate for my research paper. I know by heart that rollercoatsers are safe, but gotta find out where Markey pulls his data from. You cannot make a good debate without analyzing the opponent's viewpoints. But also, you cannot analyze the given reports without first inquiring about other motivating factors as well. But more on that later, when or if, I find any scholarly data on the topic.... though the Six Flags report holds pretty good credibility due to outside sources on the research team.

raptor4928...

Much of Markey's data comes from the reports produced by the CPSC. CPSC has produced several reports in the past few years based on their injury surveillance system. That system is great for tracking injuries caused by common products where both the use and the incidents of injury are fairly broad, as it uses a statistical sampling model. What little bit I read of one of the Six Flags reports yesterday does a pretty good job of explaining why the CPSC data is less than useful.

Another useful site for accident data is saferparks.org, which has an extensive database of incident reports gathered from State sources. The problem with that is that the states are inconsistent about what qualifies as an "accident" or "injury", so there is a lot of useless noise from New Jersey, while more serious incidents are underreported in other states.

Of course, if you are doing scholarly work beyond merely giving a persuasive argument, you can go a long way just by analyzing the limitations of the data now being collected.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

It is also worth noting that thelatest CPSC report has backpedaled on the conclusions of the previous reports. They now seem to admit that the change in the data base for the NEISS was distorting the results without ever actually admitting that the NEISS data basse is useless for measuring this type of event in the first place.

This is pointed out by the NEISS results for portable rides in 2000 and 2001. NEISS showed that portable ride accidents were up 40% in 2000 and down 50% in 2001. Common sense and a little bit of statistics and probability tells me that the number of actual injuries didn't change that much, NEISS just wasn't capable of measuring them.

As for Markey's data. He simply doesn't have any. His idea of "data" is a series of annecdotal reports of brain injuries that is available on his web site. The quality of the annecdotes is even quite poor. One is something like "a man of unknown age sufferred an unknown type of brain injury on an unknown ride, at an unknown amusement park, in May 1982. The rest of us would call that a rumour, not even decent annecdotal evidence.

Pretty interesting read actually..

Yes I read both of them all the way through but I like reading things liek this..

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June 11th, 2001 - Gemini 100
VertiGo Rides - 82
Technical Services - 2002
Frightzone Screamster - 2002