Will Pay-to-cut come to Kennywood?

RatherGoodBear said:
Did Kennywood build separate queues for these people to get to the platform, or do they have to work their way up through the narrow aisles the rides already have?

I really don't know what they are going to do. Kennywood's entrances and exits are pretty unique.

That's the thing that makes me most nervous for KW. I can't imagine them adding merge points before the station and merging in the station via exit ramp or multiple load cycles is a horrible waste of capacity.

It's only for coasters. Jack Rabbit already has a gate right at the bottom of the entrance ramp. Exterminator, Phantom, T-Bolt, Racer, and SkyRocket already have plenty of room on the exit sides of the station.

...and then there are people like me that enjoy waiting in line a little bit so that I can talk to the people I am at the park with and make more memories than just riding rides.

Tekwardo said:
And then you have people who want a little more out of their day (or in some cases a lot more), and are willing to pay for it. Why is that wrong? Shouldn't I be able to reward myself if I have a good paying career and can afford to pay to do something I enjoy? Isn't that the supposed American Dream?

Actually, the new American Dream is I want it, I'm entitled to it, so give to me and let someone else pay for it. At least the people using Lo-Q or whatever other systems there are out there are paying with their own money. Hopefully, they're not spending the rest of the week shopping at the market with food stamps.

P.S. Hoffman, you're just weird. (Only kidding.) :)

a_hoffman50 said:
...and then there are people like me that enjoy waiting in line a little bit so that I can talk to the people I am at the park with and make more memories than just riding rides.

That's what we do with all the time we're not spending in line. ;)

That 10% number wasn't assumed, Martin. The number came from park management in a recent news story.

As I said yesterday, I think that Gonch and Jeff just got through to me. It's not the "Why should I not be allowed to cut in front of everyone else, since the park is offering it and I have enough money to pay for it" that got to me. It was the cold, hard numbers; the math that I am so bad at figuring out. Wait times are really probably only about 5% longer that they would be without line cut passes. I've been arguing for no good reason.

There are still some things about it that I dislike, but I don't feel strongly enough against it to discuss it the way I have for the last decade on CoasterBuzz.

I still feel that it is somewhat of a scam. I still feel that it is sometimes blackmail, especially when a park isn't running at full capacity when they are busy. I also still feel that they should find a way to keep users from standing in two or more lines at a time, or quit marketing it as a virtual queue, because it isn't, in that respect.

But I don't feel that the numbers are going to negatively affect my visit anymore, like I did just a few days ago. Keeping that in mind, I forfeit from the argument.

Well, that's no damn fun.

I call shenanigans!

No shenanigans, Gonch. I guess time will tell. :)

Heh.

Then let me remind you that the numbers are only true for systems that make VQ guests wait in an actual 1-to-1 ratio with non-VQ guests.

Things like Disney's FastPass, Universal's Express for resort guests, SF's Gold and Platinum bots and even this Kennywood thing all skew the numbers to varying degrees.

The only constant that remains true among the various systems is that capacity doesn't change, the way it's given to guests in the park does.

LostKause said:
Wait times are really probably only about 5% longer that they would be without line cut passes.

Well, no, they wouldn't be, that was my point. If those people who are "paying to cut" were going to ride anyway, then they'd be in line with you and the net wait time would be no different. The only thing that has changed is that they're not physically in the line with you.

Yeah, but in theory they can now wait in two lines at once. Or they can take two spots in the same line.

That said, I highly doubt that half the VQers are in more than one line at once at any given time. That's probably balanced out by the Gold-Botters who can get 3 or 4 rides per wait, so half is probably a fair guess.

kpjb said:
It's only for coasters. Jack Rabbit already has a gate right at the bottom of the entrance ramp. Exterminator, Phantom, T-Bolt, Racer, and SkyRocket already have plenty of room on the exit sides of the station.

For those that load exit side, will there be multiple load cycles or dedicated cars? How will they manage the merging of the two lines?

I'm not too worried about PR since the bottleneck is actually the train on the course (well, actually lift mostly), not the load cycle, but the other rides could take a capacity hit.

ApolloAndy said:
Yeah, but in theory they can now wait in two lines at once. Or they can take two spots in the same line.

Unless you can virtually wait in more lines in a day than you could physically wait, it makes no difference. The ride capacity does not change.

I'm not advocating for or against, but it just seems to me that since I can virtually be in two places at once, I have actually doubled my load on the park. Capacity for a particular ride remains the same, but overall park load does not.

BINGO! Everyone (except for Jeff :p ) understand what my point over the last decade has been.

Jeff, this is how I came up with 5%.

10% buy cutpass. Half of those stand in two or more lines at once. Add the half (5%) to the 10%, and you get 15%. I thought that that would make the wait times 15% longer, because it is as if there are 15% more people in line with you, but where that went wrong was that I wasn't realizing that those people would be standing in line with me anyways, so it is really about 5% (10% subtract 5%), give or take a few percentage points, longer wait time. If a system where a true virtual queue, with no one waiting in another ride line at all, then the line would be no longer than if VQ wasn't available.

So many factors mess with the numbers, and everything here is just an estimate. One thing that irks me is that it not only makes lines that have VQers waiting longer, it also makes lines that don't offer VQ longer because someone could be waiting for that ride physically while being virtually in another line.

I should draw a graph or map or something. This stuff is deep, and hard to understand, yet alone hard to explain.

Oh, and I still don't dislike it anymore. If it's making my wait time only about 5% longer, it's not as bad as I thought it was. I may stop buying line cuts when I go to parks now.

Jeff said:

ApolloAndy said:
Yeah, but in theory they can now wait in two lines at once. Or they can take two spots in the same line.

Unless you can virtually wait in more lines in a day than you could physically wait, it makes no difference. The ride capacity does not change.

In the extreme case where I q-bot up a ride and then wait for the same ride in the physical queue, aren't I getting two rides for one wait every time? One from the physical line and one from the virtual line? And thus, aren't I displacing someone in the physical line?

ApolloAndy said:
And thus, aren't I displacing someone in the physical line?

Sure. But the capacity still hasn't changed. How it's distributed has. You paid more and have more access to the available capacity.

LostKause said:
So many factors mess with the numbers, and everything here is just an estimate. One thing that irks me is that it not only makes lines that have VQers waiting longer, it also makes lines that don't offer VQ longer because someone could be waiting for that ride physically while being virtually in another line.

I should draw a graph or map or something. This stuff is deep, and hard to understand, yet alone hard to explain.

Yeah, but (as you're now realizing) the impact is still minimal. And especially so when compared to the increased revenue for the park and the increased satisfaction of guests using the VQ.

That's the rub. The benefits outweigh any negatives.

Even still at that "worst case scenario" 10% number it's like a park with 25000 people (a busy day) having 27,500 people in it. When you look at it in those terms, it's easy to see how little impact it has. Does anyone really perceive the difference between a day at the park with a 10% attendance difference?

And to further muddy up the numbers (and show the minimal impact another way) the non-waits for those artifical 10% (or 2500 in our fictional scenario) are paid for by dividing that time among the actual 100% of guests (25000) in the park.

In other words the additional wait time needed to accomodate 2500 'virtual' guests is divided up among 25000 actual guests - including those who also count as virtual ones.

...and all of this is still a worst case scenario. The actual numbers are most likely (and usually) much less.

---

More of the muddying comes from the various way to look at it. With Andy's quote we're talking available capacity and the distribution of that capacity. With LK's quote we're talking time spent for a ride and how VQ changes how much time we 'pay' for a ride.

Also lets face it, the people using pay to cut systems is not the same at any point throughout the day.

During the first hour those pay to cuters are either not at the park (sleeping in) or purchasing those machines and not riding rides.

During the evening hours, most of those pay to cuters are on their way home having had a full park experience and wanting some more sleep.

I mention this because as any enthusiast I met knows, the time to ride the major rides are those first and last 2 hours of the day anyways. This system does not affect us nearly as much as you think it does. That is, unless, you ride Phantom's Revenge at 2pm in the afternoon on a regular basis.