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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?"
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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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...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
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.