What would you consider a "good" throughput for an attraction?

[Matt N]

Hi guys. In spite of what most would expect, ride popularity is not the sole factor influencing the length of a ride's queue. Throughput, or the amount of people a ride can handle in an hour (well, any given time period, but throughputs are usually measured in people per hour, or pph), has a surprisingly large effect on how long a queue is; if one ride had a 120 minute queue with a throughput of 300pph, while another ride had a 20 minute queue with a throughput of 1,800pph, the two rides would actually have the same number of people in their queues (in theory). The ride with 1,800pph only has a "shorter" queue because it can handle far more guests in a given time period. I know I used two quite extreme examples there, but my point still stands.

Before I ramble for too long, my basic point is; throughput can have a profound effect on queue times. Some attractions are real queue munchers, with huge throughputs, while others have lower throughputs and struggle a bit more. Enthusiasts often seem to mention capacity in ride reviews if it's particularly high or low. So my question to you today is; what would you consider a good throughput for a ride?

Personally, I'm unsure. I'd say it does vary a fair bit depending on the park (a Disney park will need higher throughputs than Paultons Park, for instance), as well as other factors, but taking a park like Alton Towers as an example, I'm still unsure. I always thought that 1,000pph was considered "the magic threshold" for throughput, but I'd personally plump for a little lower than that myself, as surprisingly few rides at Alton actually exceed 1,000pph, and the park seems to cope with queues well.

But what would you personally consider a "good" throughput for an attraction?

 

[pluk]

A major attraction at a major UK park 1000pph.
A filler ride at a small park 100pph.

Context will be everything.

 

[Ted]

For standard major park (i.e one that gets 1.5 to 2 million guests a season) needs to have around 1,200 people per hour on their major rides for it to be healthy for me. You can get away with a little bit less though.

For a top tier park like anything at Disney or Universal and maybe other popular independent parks like Europa, you need at least 1,800 to 2,000 for the top attractions

 

[Tim]

It's depressing how many people think queue length = rides popularity. Even by people that claim to be industry experts.

So many times I've heard people say "Duel is really unpopular because it never has a queue". But Duel does get long queues when they run it as 'Duel: live' for Scarefest and have an actor doing a pre-show. The pre-show cuts capacity and as a result every other car was empty. Suddenly the ride has a queue all the way around the graveyard. Yet the number of people riding didn't significantly change, it just couldn't keep up with demand.

The true measure of a rides popularity is 'the number of people entering the queue' + 'the number of people that would have entered if there wasn't a queue'. The answer to that would be the rides ideal capacity.
The challenge is to calculate that number before a rides even opened. As mentioned above park capacity plays a significant role as it effects both of those numbers.