Saturday, May 22, 2004
Ridiculus Cedar Point Safety Policy
You'll remember the news story about the man who fell out of a roller coaster a few weeks ago. It turned out it was mostly human error on the part of the ride operators when they didn't check the man's restraint.
Now Cedar Point is overreacting to the accident and has a new "safety" requirement for most of its major coasters. You are now required to have at least 1.5 inches of slack between the buckle and hand-loop of the seat belt. This means people who were once able to safely ride with little to no slack on the belt are being turned away. But not only are they being turned away... they are being humiliated. As you can see from that thread people have been turned away from Dragster to Blue Streak. One woman who is 5'10" and 150lbs was told she was too large to ride Blue Streak.
This does NOTHING to improve safety. An extra bit of slack on a seat belt is not going to secure you any more then no slack. In fact, with no slack there is no chance that it can become loose during the ride and let you fly up more.
It looks like Cedar Point has already received hundreds of complaints about it, so who knows where this is going to lead. ACE (the world's largest coaster club) is holding their annual event at Cedar Point this year. ACE's President made a statement that there were plenty of other things to do at Cedar Point and that they should just suck it up. I doubt Cedar Point will be able to ignore the Enthusiasts when they are all complaining at one place at one time.
Finally, it has been said that maybe the new requirements came from Intamin (the ride's designer) and that Cedar Point was required to follow them under Ohio law. This shifts the blame of "stupid idea" to Intamin, but I still fault Cedar Point for handling it so badly.
