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How do they figure out queue times?

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cptcliff

TS Member
Something that I’ve always wondered is how to they calculate queue times? I’ve never seen any cameras that look queue specific and I can’t imagine it being app or manual


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cptcliff said:
Something that I’ve always wondered is how to they calculate queue times? I’ve never seen any cameras that look queue specific and I can’t imagine it being app or manual


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A combination of staff guessing and entering time in attractions.io (on the iPad) and the Alton towers apps on people's phones reporting the presence of certain blue tooth beacons (black boxes in queue lines).
So if it sees say the nemesis entrance beacon then 25 minutes later the nemesis station beacon it calculates a queue time of 25 minutes.

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cptcliff said:
Ohh, that seems to make a lot of sense.

The Bluetooth beacon is an interesting concept, never knew that.


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Problem is say someone's phone dies in the queue then 3 hours later on a return lap it comes back on, if that happens to enough guests it can confuse the system into showing inaccurate information.

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I’m surprised they don’t use cameras but I suppose outside they’d get dirty, sun would blind them etc..


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I think it's largely to do with the overall throughput of the ride.
 
Each queue is made up of different sections each with official queue lengths. For example Nemesis has three sections, one from the entrance turning right to the station, one from the entrance turning left which loops back to the entrance, and an extension to the second area. You just look at which racks are open and then estimate the time based on how full they are vs the official queue lengths.
 
So there’s markers which are indicative to a time and you just estimate it from that (when it’s done by ride operators)


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Well, a simple example... if only one queue section is open and it's official length is 40 minutes, if that section is half full then you'd estimate the total queue at 20 minutes.
 
Not quite so simple of course, on Nemesis if the first section of Q is full it'll be about 20 min, but from the same point with a completely full Q you'll wait about 30 as there'll be a lot more fastrack users.
 
Well obviously you'd factor in more time if the merge point is open or the ride was on single train operation etc.
 
I remember back in the good old days being handed a business card size thing that had a time written on it by the staff member at the entrance and was told to hand it to the batcher in the station, he then ran over to the booth and handed it to the op in there.
 
In theory, it could be worked out by knowing the length of que and roughly calculating the throughput to give a time. But they don't do it like this. No way......not sure if anyone does....as a like minded programmer, I am sure @ihaveaspergers could very quickly work out a function to calculate this. Shame the parks are not that bothered about it. But without the actual data, any formula would be useless. But it could be done accurately pretty easy to be fair.
 
DistortAMG said:
In theory, it could be worked out by knowing the length of que and roughly calculating the throughput to give a time. But they don't do it like this. No way......not sure if anyone does....as a like minded programmer, I am sure @ihaveaspergers could very quickly work out a function to calculate this. Shame the parks are not that bothered about it. But without the actual data, any formula would be useless. But it could be done accurately pretty easy to be fair.
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Damn it! Now all I can think off is building an accurate queue time function!

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