Your recipe for the perfect roller coaster

We’re always saying how important it is for everyone to have their own opinions about roller coasters. Without different opinions the theme park community would be boring! But for this blog post we thought it would be really interesting to forget that for a minute and see if there are any trends in what we all like. We sent out a survey which aimed to highlight any aspects of roller coasters that the majority of people prefer in the hopes of coming up with a recipe for ‘the perfect roller coaster’.

Our survey was completed by 539 people which gives us a great set of data to look at and work with. It was designed to understand which aspects of coasters are most important and which coaster styles are most popular.

We asked three main questions in the survey which we will explore throughout this blog post. At the end of the post we will come up with your recipe for ‘the perfect roller coaster’ based on the data we collected.

1. How important are each of the following aspects of a roller coaster to you?

We came up with a list of the main aspects of roller coasters that we think make coasters what they are. One aspect we did leave out was theming because for the purpose of this post we are focusing on the actual roller coaster itself. Plus adding theming would have made this very complicated - theming could be its own survey! We also left out ‘smoothness’ as we felt this could be confused with intensity quite easily.

Here’s the list:

• Airtime

• Height

• Track interaction

• Speed

• Inversions

• Large drop

• Launch

• High G-Force

• Long ride

• Lift Hill

• Compact

• Fast paced

• Laterals

We asked people to rate each aspect on a scale of 1 to 5 - with 1 being not important at all and 5 being extremely important. The results from this question pretty much reflected what we expected to see. Airtime came out on top, followed by a fast pace and a long ride. You can see the full set of results for this question in the graph below:

2. Select 5 aspects of roller coasters that you think are most important and rank them in order of importance.

Next, we asked everyone to pick 5 aspects from that list and rank them in order of importance. Esentially what we’re asking is for people to pick their top 5 aspects in order. Here are the results:

1. Airtime

2. Speed ↑

3. Fast paced ↓

4. Long ride ↓

5. Inversions ↑

6. High G-Force ↓

7. Launch

8. Large drop ↓

9. Height ↑

10. Track interaction

11. Laterals ↓

12. Compact

13. Lift Hill

What’s interesting about these results is that the top 5 aspects don’t exactly match the top 5 rated aspects from the last question. For example, speed moved up to second position while fast paced move down to third. This means that although some of the aspects were rated as very important in the first question, when asked to rank their top 5 people have a slightly different opinion about which are most important. One of the most interesting examples of this is inversions; they had an average importance rating in the first question but ranked at number 5 when all the aspects were ranked.

3. Rank the following roller coaster styles in order of preference.

Finally, we asked everyone to rank a list of nine roller coaster styles in order of preference. We wanted to include this question to get an idea of which styles are most popular as this will influence our final recipe.

The results are as follows:

1. Sit-down

2. Inverted

3. Wooden

4. Wing

5. Flying

6. Floorless

7. 4D

8. Spinning

9. Stand-up
   

It’s not surprising that the top three in order is sit-down, inverted and wooden; those three coaster styles are no doubt the most popular. The rest of the list was interesting to look at, epecially the styles down at the bottom.

The recipe: a perfect roller coaster

So, based on the results of our survey we have put together a recipie for ‘the perfect roller coaster’. This has highlighted some of the main trends in our preferences as enthusiasts and has been really interesting to look at. Of course, we all have very different opinons (as we should) but it turns out there are some aspects of coasters that we all love!

Ingredients:

• 1kg of airtime

• 300ml of speed

• 2 tbsp of long ride

• Knob of fast paced

• Sprinkle of inversions

• Pinch of high G-force

Serve on a ‘sit-down’ platter.

What do you think of the results?

- Zoe

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