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Coasters to Face G-Force Limits?
jonerik writes "NBC News is reporting that today New Jersey will begin examining the possibility of placing limits on roller coaster G-forces. Pointing out that the G-forces on coasters are considerably greater than even those experienced by astronauts and race car drivers, legislators on both the state and national levels want to start reining in coaster G-forces which have been blamed for a number of injuries and deaths over the past few years. Pansies. Why do they think people ride roller coasters to begin with?"
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There are an aweful lot of roller coasters in New Jersey, and most aren't in big theme parks (like Six Flags and stuff).
Most are on the board walk on small piers, and there have been a number of deaths (actually, usually at least one every summer) from poorly design and/or maintained coasters. Regulating coasters is not necessarily a bad idea.
It makes sense to not allow high speed coasters on little piers that don't have enough staff to maintain it properly. I think that is the basis of a law like this.
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People ride them to have fun, get a thrill.
:)
Not to have their bodies exposed to more forces and danger than most astronauts ever experience - if you think about it, the astronauts are safer. The astronauts have teams of medics, special suits, and a large, strong spacecraft around them. Compare this to the average coaster-rider who is sitting in a flimsy piece of metal, or even wood - nothing protecting them from the G-forces, let alone the wind. And most people are going to ride the same coaster multiple times in a row if possible - I know I do.
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Does anyone have any links to stories about deaths which have occured from riding roller coasters? Other than having a heart attack, [which means you shouldn't have been riding in the first place] how would riding a roller coaster kill you?
This whole thing about creating a legal g-force limit is once again our government stepping in and saying "you people are too dumb to make your own decisions... we're going to protect you from yourselves". Its similar to the stupid McDonalds Coffee incident. People should be held accountable for their own [sometimes stupid] actions. You don't see the government banning skydiving because some people smacked into the ground and died. You're expected to know and accept the risks.
People need to stop blaming other people for the results of their own actions.
These are legislators solving a problem that doesn't exist
I'd say they are taking a very small problem that has already been reported and nipping it in the bud. This reminds me--the very same people who are now saying that Bush knew about 911 are the very same people that would probably have sluffed off a hijack warning before then. So, what we have here are some politicians who are actually demonstrating forsight, and getting blasted by comments like yours. Would you prefer to see a statisticly significant uptick in brain damage incidents at New Jersey hospitals before action is taken?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Lack of -training-? No, I think it's jsut that there's a lack of skilled drivers. That involves training, but is not the sole factor. We have drivers that are fearful, drivers that do things they shouldn't while driving (eating, talking on the phone, etc.), poor dextrousity, poor eyesight, and such. Training is just a small factor. Probably also a factor, is the ease that exists in getting a license. It shouldn't be as cheap as it is (cheap to renew, yes, after a basic review of continued competence), and the testing procedure shouldn't be as momentary - they should have to drive on, say, an obsticle course in an unfamiliar vehicle (one big cause for accidents), etc...
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I'm reading a lot of people's statements about P(killed on ride) vs P(killed in car on way home). This isn't the only story: long-term effects are also a big deal. In addition, even that probability is so corrupted by noise (you can get great numbers for driving, but not so great numbers for flying, because the rates of injury/death for flying is so low) that even if such signs were posted, they would be completely meaningless. For example, if no one had ever died or been injured on coaster A, what would you post? "You have a 0% probability of being injured on this ride?" That's a liability lawsuit waiting to happen.
So what if we said "don't regulate dining establishments; if you don't want to get Hepatitis, then you can make your own evaluation of the place's cleanliness. On it's face, this seems outrageous; however, most of us have the skills to decide if a food preparation place is hygenically adequate. How many of us (or the general populace) has the skills to decide if a roller-coaster ride is safe, esp long-term? (I'm paranoid about things like this, to the extent that I don't do LASIK because there are no 50-year studies).
Summation: informed consent is a good thing; some level of protecting idiots from themselves is also important, especially since most of us don't have domain knowledge in roller-coaster design. Safety vs car is apples-to-oranges, hence we should require, for example, 99th percentile Gs/time and jerk/time graphs, just like we have "SAR" for cell phones, for which no one actually knows safety parameters... By this logic, however, we should grade food establishments, make them post their grades, but never shut someone down for an F...
Trend? I see incomplete data. Also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Where are statistics about ridership versus injuries?
"If a drug caused 58 cases of brain damage, it would be pulled!" Do some research. Do you know how many thousands of deaths each year are attributed to very popular FDA approved OVER THE COUNTER drugs? Do Tylenol and Asprin ring a bell?
Why don't you work on banning alcohol which causes orders of magnitude more deaths and permanent injuries than something as insignificant as roller coaster.
Don't you understand that we have much greater problems to worry about in this country and regulating roller coasters is not the best place to spend our tax dollars right now?
Today in terms of safety expenditures, we spend $0.0021 per mile for airlines, $0.00015 per mile for automobiles. If we spend $0.00015 per mile on roller coasters we would only be spending $75,000 per year. In 1997 there were 21920 auto fatalities, 3 roller coaster fatalities.
No, that's not their job. But sometimes they think it is, and that is pretty god-damned unfortunate.
I'm sitting down and writing this guy a letter -- what a coincidence, he happens to be my rep.
Not only has there not been an accident of this sort in Mass, the area he represents doesn't have any rollercoasters worth mentioning, if at all.
What I don't understand is that he is elected to represent my area -- how does spearheading a bill that's trying to reduce the chances of something thats safer than walking across the street and isn't even a problem at all in my area represent me and the people who are also in this district?
No wonder we have problems -- these guys don't even know what their job is...
dennis
what about the morons behind you who are riding your rear bumper when you stop?!
If you aren't following so close that you need to slam on your brakes, then it shouldn't be a problem. And if you're behind a bus, be prepared, idiot!
...keep their goddamn hands off the things I enjoy.
If you think regulating roller coasters is such a great idea, remember that a government that has power to regulate something you don't think is important about also has the power to regulate something you do think is important!
A story like this should not have you thinking, "Well, that sounds reasonable." It should have have you thinking, "How much more personal freedom are We the People willing to give up?"
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There are many factors involved and I'm not so sure people are willing to investigate them before coming to a conclusion. Think of the many things going on:
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1. More riders at amusement parks
2. Constant rate of injuries
3. Increasing G-force rides
4. Increasing awareness and record keeping
Possible Conclusions:
1. Increased g-force rides causing more reported injuries? (trend?)
2. Increasing ridership causing more reported injuries? (incomplete data?)
3. Increasing awareness causing more reported injuries? (self fulfilling prophecy?)
As for usage v.s. injuries I was talking about possible conclusion #2 regarding increasing ridership.
After I pointed out Tylenol and Aspirin you started to understand the concept of acceptable risk, significantly more than 58 deaths is apparently something that many people are willing to accept for drugs that may be beneficial. Strangely enough it is often thought that if the FDA were to go through an clinicial trial of aspirin today they would not allow aspirin to be an OTC drug. By the way aspirin bottles don't list side effects.
As for why I said we should focus on the biggest factors of death? Simple. It's because we have limited budgets. Maybe you might not mind being taxed even more but I know that I'm taxed far too much as it is. So if we are dealing with limited resources, and we are in the business of saving lives, I want to save the most lives for the available resources.
By the way, you don't have to waste your time finding the most dangerous things, that's already been done for you:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/datawh/statab/unpub
(/. inserts an extra space in the url)
You can even find that in 1992, there were two people over the age of 100 that died as a result of injuries while on ice skates, skis, roller skates or skate boards. Total number of deaths were: 57.
23 people were killed by lawn mowers.
137 people literally starved to death.
530 people died in their swimming pools.
Even if you still want to regulate g-forces on roller coasters, you're looking in the wrong place to reduce the number of amusement park deaths. Most deaths are attributed to poor maintanence and human errors, not g-force brain injuries: http://members.aol.com/rides911/accidents.htm Remember that we have virtually no data on the actual number of lives that will be saved by the g-force limitations.
As I said before, with limited resources, we don't have the luxury of inefficiency if we are trying to save lives.