Will Pay-to-cut come to Kennywood?

I love that argument, hombre. It was my initial reaction to the Q-Bot story many years ago, although you just took it a step further.

But then people started saying that it wasn't really cutting in line.

Then I said yes it is because people get the same benefits from line cutting as the do pay-to-cut, which is riding ride whale they should be standing in line for rides.

Try doing everything that pay-to-cut allows you to do without buying the pay-to cut. Se how long you last in the park before security throws you out.

The parks are effectively accepting a bribe to allow people to break the rules.

I still think I'm buying acess to an entirely different line when I use Q-bot. I'm not cutting in your line, I'm using a priority access line.

And yes, you'd get kicked out trying to access that line without the bot.(or any area you're not authorized to be in, really)

With H-Bot, you're allowed to enter restricted areas of Batman-themed coasters to retrieve your hat. :)

The best way I can wrap my brain around it is simply that it's an "exception" rule: No line jumping, except if you have Q-Bot. No smoking, except if you're in a designated smoking area. You must wear a shirt, except if you're on a water ride. Etc. etc. It's just that we didn't have the Q-Bot rule until very recently. Of course, many parks didn't have the smoking rule until recently either, which is probably why it still takes employees to enforce it and point it out to people.

I want the concession for those R-bots...I'd make a mint off of the queue monkeys!

I still don't like virtual queueing. I had a particularly bad experience with it at Disney on one particular ride (Toy Story Mania) where the existence of the virtual queue caused me a 120-minute wait, where without the virtual queue the same ride would have not been physically capable of generating a 120 minute wait. And yes, this was a worst-case scenario playing out in real life, on a day when the park was not particularly busy. It was caused by the same bull-rush effect that made the Millennium Force ticketing program such a dismal failure a decade ago.

What happened was that when the park opened, apparently everybody in the park raced for that ride and exhausted the entire days' supply of virtual queue tickets. They did this because the FastPass machines can serve up tickets at about 4x the rate that people can actually get into the main queue. From the look of it, they probably did that while NOT actually riding the ride. By the time I got there (I had been in another park when the ride opened...) the FastPass was no longer an option, and the queue house was completely full with a line that was basically not moving because the 1,800 PPH measured capacity of the ride was running at about 80% FastPass. The thing is, with the ride running at 1,800 PPH and people streaming into the queue house at 2,400 PPH (as fast as they can crowd through the door) the ride can only increase its wait by about 20 minutes per hour of operation (600 PPH). That means that by 1pm, when I arrived, the maximum wait time should be 60 minutes. In practice it should be even less than that because it's hard to keep up a 2,400 PPH crush for very long unless the park is really, really, really busy.

Anyway, the end result in this case was that everybody had to wait longer. The FastPass people had to wait the longest because they had to wait for their window to open (although admittedly they could do other stuff while waiting), and the rest of us had to wait much longer than we should have in a very unpleasant queue because of the distribution of limited ride capacity.

Another important lesson to be learned here is that the length of the line and the time of the wait is less important than the speed at which the line is moving. Had the line actually been *moving* for two hours, the kids would not have been screaming nearly as much..

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

You always bring up that fringe case, and it still doesn't make sense. You had to wait longer because there were thousands of people in line in front of you, whether they were physically in line or not. It's not more complicated than that.

How did those thousands of people get there? If there hadn't been an additional entry point to the queue, it would have been physically impossible for many of those people to be there. This gets back to why Gemini had to have the entrance stairway added for the 1979 season...because people simply couldn't get to the boarding platform as quickly as the ride could take them away.

The solution to long lines is high capacity. Unless you fix that problem, long lines are inevitable. If all you do is make it possible for more people to wait in line, virtually or otherwise, you're going to end up with a longer line. That's also why you do other things to limit traffic flow, like putting turnstiles at ride entrances, using narrow entryways, and shutting down queue entrances when the ride isn't running. It's a race between the turnstile and the ride, and it is a race that the turnstile almost always wins. Giving the turnstile more of an advantage doesn't fix the problem.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Wow, Dave. Someone as smart as you agreeing with even just a little bit of my views on pay-to-cut, is like music to my ears.

...And with the extra insight that I've come to expect form a Rideman post...wow.

And if the entire 100% of ride capacity was given to reservations, there'd be no physical line at all...and a minimal wait, at worst.

I'm not sure I see the point. The parks are letting more people stand in line. So what? It doesn't change capacity, it just changes how many people are waiting for one of those seats available during the day at any moment.

Any given coaster sometimes has a short line and sometimes has a long one depending on how many people decide to stand in line and wait for a ride at any given time.

I think the problem is that people are willing to physically stand in a 120 minute long line for an attraction. If so many people weren't willing to wait so long, there wouldn't be as long of a line either.

All you really seem to be saying is that parks shouldn't allow so many people to wait for a ride at one time.

I have a solution for that.

Shorter queues. ;)

I like the higher capacity solution better.

Actually, Gonch, you've got a good point there. And it's been tried. In 2000, Cedar Point went 100% VQ on Millennium Force. Again, limited capacity for the entire day, everybody had a 1 hour window in which to ride the ride, and the queue was still frequently full to capacity. But given that the queue only holds about an hours' worth of riders, and all riders got a 60-minute window to ride, that is understandable.

What happened was that the ride "sold out" in the first two hours of the day, often even before many of the potential riders had arrived in the park. Due to a largely transient population, no black market in ride tickets ever developed, but anecdotally it is known that there were instances of ticket hoarding and tickets were distributed which were not used.

If you really want to see the ****storm that developed over that program, you can read about it on PointBuzz. It is interesting to see the progression in that thread, from interest, to support as the program was announced, to total outrage once the program was actually implemented.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

LostKause said:
I like the higher capacity solution better.

Yeah, but at what point does it balance to a zero return? Assuming you're running rides efficiently (and I think it's safe to say Disney World is :) ), then the only way to add capacity is more attractions.

So more attractions means more capacity. And more attractions also means more people come to the park, more demand - that's the definition of growth. (and I dare say when a park adds attractions it wants to add to demand as well - these rides aren't built for free, after all)

So you're back to square one. You've increased capacity, but demand rises too...because if it doesn't...well, you don't really increase capacity with a low-demand attraction and you certainly don't want to spend money on attractions that people don't want to come and ride.

So what is capacity? The amount of people the a ride (or park, or whatever) can handle.

Disney decides that already, don't they? How many times have we heard stories about peak season reaching capacity and the gates to Disney parks being closed. At that point Disney has decided that available capacity can't handle the current demand. They do it with FastPass, they're controlling the demand by handing out ride times.

Efficiency isn't just capacity, it's the effect of capacity combined with demand.

Dave's complaint is that the park doesn't handle demand as well as they could. They're letting the demand for a ride go higher than its capacity can handle.

Think of it like money. Demand is debt and capacity is income. How do you solve your financial woes, by constantly trying to make more to handle your increasing spending or by getting your spending in check? Odds are you'll find a balance that works for you. It's not always about increasing your capacity for debt, but sometimes about limiting the demand on your income. (see the clever wordplay there? :) )

I'm not sure where I'm heading with this. Deep breath.

I guess my point is, how do you add capacity (especially at WDW) without also increasing demand? They could artificially decrease demand (in ways too numerous to detail here), but they can do that now as it stands. They've chosen the balance of capacity/demand that they're comfortable with...

...and they've chosen a place where 120 minute lines form for Toy Story.

In fairness, part of the problem with Toy Story has to do with a combination of a weird circumstance of park population, Disney's failure to enforce the arrival windows for FastPass riders, and an inappropriate action on the part of the person operating the merge point. I should note that the line barely moved for the first hour, then started moving slowly, and of course moved very quickly once past the merge point. What happened after my first hour of waiting in line? There was a crew rotation, and the person operating the merge point started enforcing the 80/20 split instead of assuming that the VQ riders were arriving as scheduled.

Even with all that, the fact remains that the system increases the rate at which people can get into the line without getting them off the ride any faster.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

RideMan said:
What happened was that the ride "sold out" in the first two hours of the day, often even before many of the potential riders had arrived in the park. Due to a largely transient population, no black market in ride tickets ever developed, but anecdotally it is known that there were instances of ticket hoarding and tickets were distributed which were not used.

And right there's your problem. CP didn't account for that. You can't just hand out capacity without understanding your customers.

As I've mentioned a million times, my wife runs a hotel. Her hotel has X number of rooms. If she stops selling at X, you know how many times she ends the day with empty rooms? 9 out of 10.

Luckily, she understands the market and the tendencies of her guests and knows when to stop at X and when to oversell...and by how much. You know how many times she fills every room in the hotel with little hassle? 10 out of 10.

Line management is not a science, it's an art. You can't just hand out X number of reserved spots because that's what your ride theoretically moves. It's may start with cold, hard math, but it's works because of graceful, knowing brush strokes.

CP's 100% reservation system was a failure because they didn't know what they were doing, not because it can't be done.

There were some interesting customer behavior issues that came up with the ticket system, too. The tickets were gone by Noon, and if you were smart, you waited until the END of your hour to ride, because you could be almost guaranteed a short wait because most people would camp out at the ride entrance and flood the queue at the beginning of each hour. Of course, if everyone were smart and waited until the end of the hour, there would be times during the day when nobody was riding. That's where Disney's 10-minute window starts to make a whole lot of sense.

Of course, there are a couple of easy things that CP could have done. For starters, they could have used a shorter window. Even 30 minutes would have been an improvement. Next, and more important, they could have paused the ticket distribution at times so that they would be able to "sell" seats later in the day. But odds are it wouldn't have made much difference...at the beginning of the day, they had a ticket line that went all the way down the Frontier Trail, turned around and came back, and if distribution was halted for an hour, those people would wait in line for it to open back up again.

What they basically did was to trade a long wait for the ride for a long wait to get a ticket, followed by a longer wait for the ride time window to open (albeit that time spent able to do other stuff) followed by a long wait for the ride.

The system ought to work, but so far nobody has figured out how to make it work in real life. The most effective solution still seems to be to build the rides to move 2,400 PPH or more, but that's even harder to do.

(Why 2,400 PPH? Because at average walking pace and average comfortable social distance in a single-file line, that's how fast people move, on average)

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Disney's system works. You haven't offered any evidence otherwise other than being miffed you waited as long as you did.

RideMan said:
How did those thousands of people get there? If there hadn't been an additional entry point to the queue, it would have been physically impossible for many of those people to be there.

That's exactly my point. What's yours? The physical space of the real world queue is still irrelevant. They put on the sign that it's a two-hour wait, accounting for the people coming in via FastPass.

Even with all that, the fact remains that the system increases the rate at which people can get into the line without getting them off the ride any faster.

Again, totally irrelevant. You seem unwilling to accept that there is no distinction between the physical queue and the virtual one. I've seen the lines you speak of at that specific ride, with the big 120 on the sign, and I don't get in those lines.

If some poorly trained person wasn't managing the pass at that attraction that day, that's a bummer, but it's not representative of how the system generally works and certainly doesn't make it a failure. I've spent a week locked into the property for two years in a row, and it kicks more ass than Jack Bauer.

Sadly, the ride (TSMM) is SO good that it generates really long lines while RnRC and ToT have 20-30 minute waits...totally *love* the ride. Just wish other people weren't as enamored as I am. ;)

When I said that I like higher capacity solution better, I was talking about the overall capacity of an entire park, so yes, I meant that a park should have more rides, so that people wait in line less.

Cedar Point, for example, has to build new rides just to keep attendance flat. Presently, lines should be starting to get noticeably shorter, theoretically, because the same amount of people the previous years are waiting in more lines.

So, it goes without saying that I disagree that if a park builds more attractions, more people will come. That's the strawman for the rest of your argument in that particular post, in my opinion. If a park finds that that is the case, like Disney, then they can keep expending until they meet the same kind of flat attendance that Cedar Point has found.

I will agree that building and staffing rides is costly. Adjusting for that shouldn't be too difficult though.

Yeah, my park would have short lines, and no need for so-called "queue management". It would still remain profitable too, because the short lines would be noticeable, and people would probably pay more for the experience (like Discovery Cove, for example).

Growing (increasing overhead) while attendance remains flat means something has to give - either your profit margins or your low prices.

You suggest people would pay an increased rate for your superior experience.

So you're artificially limiting demand with price. (and accounting for flat attendance and increaded costs at the same time)

Any park can do that at any time without increasing capacity or adding anything.

Which is exactly what I said. :)

RideMan said:
What happened was that the ride "sold out" in the first two hours of the day, often even before many of the potential riders had arrived in the park.

Indeed. This is precisely why in my view the Disney free fastpass system - which almost everyone here seems to like so much - doesn't really work. It's fine if you're at the park in the first hour after opening (when you don't really need fastpasses anyway!), but any later than that, on busier days at any rate, all the passes for that day have been taken resulting in longer lines than ever for non-fastpass holders. I MUCH prefer a paid fastpass system which, by its very nature, by and large ensures that fastpasses are available for all those who chose to purchase them.

I MUCH prefer no fastpasses at all, which ensures that everyone wait an equal amount of time, in line, as long as the demand for the attraction dictates at that particular time of the season and that particular time of the day.

In Lo-Q's case, forcing people who don't pay to wait in a longer line than it should be seems crooked. In Disney's case, forcing people to wait in a longer line because they were at the other park earlier in the day (a feature that they paid extra for by adding parkhopper to their ticket price) seems a little less crooked, but also seems kind of useless.

With all the thought these parks have been putting into finding ways to let people cut in front of other people, shouldn't they finally consider it to be a waste of time? It doesn't work as smoothly as they predicted a decade ago, and it is such a hassle to park guests. I like simplicity.