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General Queue Times Discussion 2023

Ethan said:
Why do parks do it though? What do they gain from it? It doesn't matter who can see queue times surely. There's no logical reason to hide them
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I mean this topic is a good example of why they do it. Google will direct people to sites like this when people search “what are the queues like at Alton Towers” and then they get pages of hysteria when Smiler goes down for 20 minutes.

They are a business, they want to control the narrative to some extent.
 
Rob said:
Equally why would people not at the parks need to see the queue times? There is no logical reason to show them. Queue times are relevant to those guests at the theme park.
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I personally enjoy seeing what's happening at the park on a daily basis. I don't need to look at the queues but I like to. I'm very popularity driven so I like to see which rides are the busiest. And yes I know queue times don't equal popularity but I roughly know the throughputs of the rides so I have a good idea of how many people are in each queue. For example, Smiler on 4 trains yesterday was averaging 61 dispatches per hour (976pph) so with the queue being 120 mins that means there was approximately 1952 in the queues for the ride
 
Fasttrack and rap (which can vary incredibly by the day for some reason) say hello, and if you are not on the park you don't know the number of trains on the track, so your numbers are pretty meaningless.
The park is a financially driven large company, and has no duty to broadcast commercially sensitive information to the nation, or to individual thoosies for that matter.
Early on when BPB published the information, I had a chat with Nick Thompson (such a name dropper) at the FY4 bar about the great ease of being able to check the ride queues out before driving to the park.
Within a week, surprise surprise, the queues had been geolocked to the park area.
Me and my gob.
Within a few more months queue-times was up and running.
 
rob666 said:
Fasttrack and rap (which can vary incredibly by the day for some reason) say hello, and if you are not on the park you don't know the number of trains on the track, so your numbers are pretty meaningless.
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Fastrack and RAP don't impact the total throughput though. If the thoughput is for example 976pph and there is a queue time of 60 mins, then 70-75% of those 976 people will be in the main queue and the rest in RAP and fastrack. When the park estimate queue times they will take into consideration the amount of people in all the queues not just the main queue. So if there's 800 main queue, 100 RAP and 76 Fastrack that's 976 people, which means it'll take an hour to get through that number of people
 
Ethan said:
I personally enjoy seeing what's happening at the park on a daily basis. I don't need to look at the queues but I like to. I'm very popularity driven so I like to see which rides are the busiest. And yes I know queue times don't equal popularity but I roughly know the throughputs of the rides so I have a good idea of how many people are in each queue. For example, Smiler on 4 trains yesterday was averaging 61 dispatches per hour (976pph) so with the queue being 120 mins that means there was approximately 1952 in the queues for the ride
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I'm sorry to break it to you, but theme parks do not exist so that people can sit at home and work these sorts of things out every day. Of course those stats are interesting, but for the operations teams at Alton Towers.

The good news for you is that queue-times.com exists, so there is no impact on you at all from this change Alton Towers have made!
 
Ethan said:
Fastrack and RAP don't impact the total throughput though. If the thoughput is for example 976pph and there is a queue time of 60 mins, then 70-75% of those 976 people will be in the main queue and the rest in RAP and fastrack. When the park estimate queue times they will take into consideration the amount of people in all the queues not just the main queue
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How do you know they will make that adjustment though?
You don't.
RAP loading often slows down dispatches, but sometimes doesn't.
Temporary stoppages, train add ons and removals, and quick puke clean ups all make the queuetimes absolutely variable, all day, every day.

A bit like my old maths teachers big estimate question...
How many turds can you fit in a bucket...
Size of bucket, size of turds, consistency, are you counting an extra heap on top...
Lots and lots of variables make estimates just that.
Looking on ridetimes is a great way of killing time when you really should be doing something more constructive.
Takes one to know one.
 
Ethan said:
I personally enjoy seeing what's happening at the park on a daily basis. I don't need to look at the queues but I like to. I'm very popularity driven so I like to see which rides are the busiest. And yes I know queue times don't equal popularity but I roughly know the throughputs of the rides so I have a good idea of how many people are in each queue. For example, Smiler on 4 trains yesterday was averaging 61 dispatches per hour (976pph) so with the queue being 120 mins that means there was approximately 1952 in the queues for the ride
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*Insert famous John Wardley Air Tunnel quote here*
 
Alexsniff7 said:
it's a good way to see how busy it is, so if you are going in the next few days you can plan accordingly
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It's a pain in the proverbial from a business point of view:
  • Downtime is constantly reported on social media and enthusiast sites despite sometimes being for unavoidable reasons like weather or dropped articles
  • Social media posts gain traction and visibility meaning further negative press for the resort
  • Then the mainstream press use it to trawl for trash stories about "PeOpLe BeInG sTuCk DaNgLiNg FoR hOuRs"
I don't feel queue times really give an idea of how busy the park is anyway. Ride reliability has been so hit and miss it's impossible to tell how things are going to be from one day to the next. If there's really a need to determine how busy the park is going to be the usual useful checks like decent weather forecast, school holidays, it being a weekend or school trip season is a far better method than constantly refreshing the app for a queue time which might not even be recent or accurate in the first place.
 
Ethan said:
Fastrack and RAP don't impact the total throughput though. If the thoughput is for example 976pph and there is a queue time of 60 mins, then 70-75% of those 976 people will be in the main queue and the rest in RAP and fastrack. When the park estimate queue times they will take into consideration the amount of people in all the queues not just the main queue. So if there's 800 main queue, 100 RAP and 76 Fastrack that's 976 people, which means it'll take an hour to get through that number of people
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That doesn’t make the main queue contain 976 people, though, which is what the queue time given on the app estimates. If the main queue is listed as 1 hour long and the ride as a whole is getting 976pph as its throughput, the main queue will not necessarily have anywhere near 976 people in it. The queue time estimate on the app does not care about Fastrack or RAP or the throughput of the overall ride; it purely cares about the main queue throughput relative to the amount of people in the main queue.

I’ve previously seen, with my own eyes, instances where the main queue gets as little as 1/3 of the overall throughput at Alton Towers. In this instance, the ride in question was Spinball Whizzer, which was overall attaining about 600pph. By your logic, an hour-long queue would have contained 600 people, but in reality, it would only have contained around 200 people due to only 1/3 of total throughput going towards the main queue.

I’m not saying that Smiler is necessarily that extreme in how much or little throughput it allocates towards the main queue, but my point is more that at Alton Towers, you can’t accurately estimate the number of people in the main queue using such a blunt formula. At a place like Europa Park, where Fastrack is non-existent and RAP is very limited, you probably could take a fair stab at it using that formula, but at Alton Towers, Fastrack and RAP will take a not insignificant, and often wildly variable, share of the overall ride throughput, so you can’t reliably estimate the number of people in the queue based on the hourly throughput alone.
 
An old tale.
Booked on the Grand Prix cars on the Beach on a busy night with mates, on speedypass standard, two hours it said.
The queue was just onto the overpass footpath, so only about thirty feet long in total.
We watched the people who joined the queue as we booked in...from Crevettes, for two hours, the non drivers got hammered.
We got on the ride two hours later, precisely in front of the people we had spotted.
Nobody would have ever thought that queue, with about fifty people in it, would take two hours.
In the "old days", that queue would have been half an hour.
Any minor stoppage wipes out any "standard" calculation as well, sheeple often slow things down, especially small sheeple.
 
Matt N said:
By your logic, an hour-long queue would have contained 600 people, but in reality, it would only have contained around 200 people due to only 1/3 of total throughput going towards the main
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I said that not all of the throughput figure will just come from main queue. If the throughput is 976pph and there's that amount in all 3 queues then it will still take those at the back of the main queue an hour because those in Fastrack and RAP will get on before them
 
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The current single rider queue🤣 I'll let you guys know how long it takes. Don't think I've queued this far back before
Edit: Waited 53 mins so not as bad as I thought it'd be tbf. Think I did wait from a similarly point last year and it took 65 but it was on 3 trains then
 
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The queues look big today. I was there on Sunday and had expected it to be bad but the longest we queued was 40 minutes for Rita. Everything else was under 30 mins (including The Smiler) The single rider queue was empty! Is this because people avoid weekends, thinking that it will be really busy, and week days are worse due to the school trips? Obviously the weather won't be helping today, there were only a few very brief breakdowns on Sunday I think.
 
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