vote coasters
the world’s largest annual roller coaster poll
where did it all start?
Vote coasters started in 2017, originally named the golden cog awards. In the beginning, the poll determined the UK’s best thrill coaster. Since then it’s grown yearly, polling a wider range of roller coasters and improving in methodology. Today, vote coasters polls roller coasters all around the globe!
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2017 - UK’s best thrill coaster
In 2017 the Golden Cog Awards was created as a fun way for the Coaster Bot community to poll some roller coasters. It started off small, originally consisting of 23 different thrill coasters scattered around the UK. It was a real beta test of what was to come in the following years.
With over 100 entries, the results were interesting! Nemesis ranked as the UK’s best, quickly followed by The Swarm in second place, and The Smiler third. At the other end, Colossus was found to be the UK’s worst thrill coaster. All in all, a successful first poll!
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2018 - Europe’s top 25 coasters
In 2018 the poll expanded outside of the UK to cover Europe as a whole. From a shortlist of 30 roller coasters, the community ranked their favourites, creating a list that was whittled down to Europe’s best 25!
In the end there were over 300 entries were submitted across 20 different nationalities, which ranked a total of 2500 roller coasters. The results were awesome! Wildfire was deemed Europe’s best - a wooden roller coaster. Expedition GeForce ranked second, followed by Der Schwur des Kärnan, Hyperion and Helix!
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2019 - World's top 100 coasters
The poll exploded in 2019 to encompass the entire world! With the aim of finding the best 100 roller coasters across the globe, the community was encouraged to go wild. Any roller coaster could be polled, no matter the location.
After 900 entries, and 16000 rides being ranked within the lists, the results were in. The community put Steel Vengeance as the world’s best roller coaster! Though it was tight at the top, El Toro polled second, followed by Lightning Rod, Zadra and Fury 325! All 100 rides came from a real mixture of countries around the globe.
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2020 - Vote coasters
In 2020, we rebranded the Golden Cog Awards to bring the branding more in line with the poll’s core messages and to reflect its main goals. We also introduced a brand new, custom made drag and drop ranking portal to make it easier to rank coasters.
The debut of vote coasters was more successful than we imagined it would be. Nearly 2,700 users took part from over 40 different countries and ranked more than a combined 115,000 roller coasters. Steel Vengeance came out on top for the second year in a row, followed by Zadra in second and Lightning Rod in third.
The popularity and craving for a roller coaster poll was started by Mitch Hawker. Back in 1994, he began asking roller coaster fans about their favourite wooden roller coasters in the hopes of finding the world’s best. What made Mitch’s poll innovative was its ranking system - a pairwise method that compares individual pairs of roller coasters, drastically reducing ridership bias.
unfortunately, the poll stopped for good in 2013. However, since 2020 Vote coasters has picked up where Mitch left off, using the same ranking system to accurately find the world’s best roller coasters.