Build the coaster twice. Once here first.
A regional park signs off on a thirty-million-dollar coaster and finds out what it did to the rest of the park after it opens. The draw is the easy part. The part nobody models is the fifteen thousand extra walking trips a day that now have to cross a midway that was already tight at four o’clock.
So model it. Below is a working twin of Kings Dominion on its real footpath network, playing a peak Saturday from opening to close. Pick a coaster a manufacturer actually sells, drop it on a plot, and watch the queues build and the walkways load.
One park, 43 attractions, 1,892 routed walking paths
Every path on the map is a real routed walkway with a measured length and walking time, not a line between two dots. Every coaster in the picker is a model a manufacturer publishes a capacity figure for, linked to the page it came from.
Scrub the day, switch between where the foot traffic changes, where it is heaviest, and where the queues actually sit. Change anything on the left and the whole park re-solves.
Thoosie
Park Twin · Kings Dominion
loading park network…
How much bigger the gate gets in year one. Your number, from your own history. The twin’s job is what happens inside the fence once you set it.
A new headliner takes more of the park than its specs alone would earn, and gives some back by season three.
Pathways that take the load
The six walkway corridors whose peak-hour pedestrian flow rises most, in people per minute per meter of width. Color is Fruin’s walkway level of service at the width you set: free restricted at capacity.
| Corridor | Before | After | Change |
|---|
Congestion is a width problem and centerline mapping carries no widths, so this one is a dial rather than a measurement. In a real engagement we take it off aerial imagery per segment.
Where the riders come from
A new headliner does not only add demand, it moves it. Measured at today’s attendance so the gate uplift does not mask the substitution.
| Attraction | Before | After | Change |
|---|
This is a demonstration of the method on one park we hold a full routed path network for. A real engagement calibrates every parameter below against your gate history, your ride telemetry and your own path widths, and pre-registers the prediction so it can be scored against what actually happens.
What is measured, what is assumed, and what only you have
A counterfactual simulation is worth nothing if you cannot see which parts of it are load-bearing. So here is the whole ledger, including the parts that are weak.
Measured — ours or published
- 1,892 routed walking paths between attractions, each with its own polyline, distance and walking time
- 43 attraction positions to five decimal places
- Manufacturer-published capacity, height, speed, length and train count for all 19 models in the picker, every one linked to the spec sheet it was read from
- 17 of the 43 attractions carry capacity and pull from the crowd model’s Kings Dominion roster, calibrated against real recorded waits
- Ten years of posted-wait history behind that roster, with a live tier refreshed across 139 parks
Assumed — stated, not hidden
- The other 26 attractions get a capacity and pull default by ride class, because the calibrated roster does not cover them. Kiddie flats are set at 320/hr, which is where two-minute cycles with loading families actually land
- Eight attraction visits per guest per day, arriving on a curve that ramps through late morning, plateaus across the afternoon at 11.2% of the day per hour, and fades after seven
- The day runs in 15-minute frames with each station’s queue carried between them, so waits build and drain rather than sitting at one number
- Stations dispatch at a flat rate all day. Trains dropped for staffing, which moves real capacity by a third, are invisible from outside and not modeled
- Guests pick the next attraction by pull against walking time, and tolerate a longer walk for a bigger ride: about 12 minutes for a mid-card, 18 for a headliner
- They balk at queues, which is what holds the park in balance. The whole park is solved to that fixed point, not in one pass
- Rides run at 85% of published theoretical capacity, which is generous on a staffed-down day
- The graph is snapped to a 10-meter grid so two routes down one midway do not read as two midways. Costs 2.9% on path length; walking times come from the unsnapped originals
- The new plot ties into the network by a straight spur to the nearest existing attraction
- Walkway width is uniform at whatever you set it to, and queues never spill out into the walkway
Yours — we cannot scrape it
- Attendance uplift. Your gate history is the only honest source for it, which is why it is a control here and not an output
- Measured path widths, or the aerial imagery to take them off
- Trains in operation by day, which moves real capacity by a third and is invisible from outside
- Fast Lane share of station throughput
- Food, retail and per-cap yield by location
Posted waits are padded by every park that publishes them, so any throughput figure derived from them inherits that bias. We say so in the deliverable rather than in a footnote.
The twin is backtestable, which is unusual
Simulation projects normally die because the customer has no ground truth to check them against. Every new coaster that opens anywhere is a natural experiment, and we hold before-and-after telemetry on both sides of a lot of them.
What we hold
- Per-ride posted-wait history going back ten years
- A live tier refreshed across 139 parks
- Ride opening dates joined to manufacturer throughput
- 1.36 million closure observations in the core sample alone
- Closures outnumber our own collection gaps eight to one
How it gets scored
- The predicted park-wide effect is registered before the opening
- Then scored against what the telemetry actually did
- Hits and misses both published
- Same discipline as the forecast scoreboard
- No retro-fitting a model to an opening it already saw
Where it is honestly weak
- Counterfactuals are materially harder than forecasting
- Within-park reliability has a measured ceiling around 0.53
- The crowd index is not valid at Disney or Universal
- Absolute queue minutes need calibration against your own data
- Without measured widths, bottlenecks are ranked, not certified
What a real one looks like
Four to six weeks, one park, one capital decision. The output is a document your board can argue with, not a dashboard nobody opens.
Run yours before the steel is ordered
Tell us the park and the decision on the table. You will get an honest read on what we can model from public data alone and what we would need from you.
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