When visiting your favorite theme parks, there are always a few off-putting experiences that seem to have become necessities, despite being a bit of an off-putting experience to most guests. Parking fees are a great example. Especially at parks that have taken inspiration from sports stadiums and jacked up the price of parking for the afternoon from a mild inconvenience (around $7 or $8) to something more akin to highway robbery.
Even worse, there are a few parks out there that have adopted the concept of surge pricing, otherwise known as dynamic pricing, for their parking lots. This means as the parks get more crowded (or on days they expect to be), the price of parking rises.
This gets even more insulting when you realize that the more crowded it is, the further away your parking spot will be from the gate. Thereby increasing the length of your already long walk back to the car at the end of the day.
However, today, I’d like to discuss a different concept, one that takes place inside most theme parks at the entrance to the bigger thrill rides. Yes, I’d like to discuss the concept of ride lockers. To be more precise, I’m talking about the smaller lockers to store personal items while you take a spin on that great big roller coaster, rather than the bigger lockers near the main gate used to stow your larger personal items like backpacks for the duration of your park day.
Theme park lockers
In older parks, and more common on older rides, you may find free storage cubbies in the coaster station. These are a great temporary place to toss your sunglasses or maybe that big stuffed plush animal you won at the midway games. Riders then grab these items as they exit. For many years, this system worked well, except for the occasional misfortunate rider who may have had a wallet or car keys slip out of their shallow pockets.
Things started to shift with the mass adoption of mobile phones. These are both expensive to replace and loaded with valuable personal data. So, most don’t want to risk them by tossing them in a bin where anyone could grab them. People are also bringing more personal items into the park with them than before.
Plus, many park chains have been pushing the sale of refillable plastic drink bottles. The sale of these has proven to be profitable for the park. Also, it reduces a good percentage of the daily waste by reducing the number of disposable beverage cups.
On the attractions side of things, however, the creation of much more aggressive thrill rides has risen over the past 25 years. There are swinging and spinning flat rides that not only flip riders upside-down several times but can hold them inverted for prolonged periods. This is to say nothing about the outrageous evolution of roller coasters.
Parks can now offer never-before-seen inversion styles and dives on hybrid wooden roller coasters. The evolution of steel coasters has created elements that offer extreme moments of Negative-G airtime, prolonged sections of inverted track, beyond vertical plunges from several hundred feet in the air, as well as launch systems that can propel trains of riders upwards of 150mph!
New demands
The need to prevent riders from bringing loose objects with them on these extreme coasters has never been higher. Some parks ask that riders use the aforementioned cubbies in the station if they are there. However, the practice causes noticeable delays in dispatching ride vehicles.
The delay caused by riders crossing through the train to store loose objects and returning is 30 seconds or less. Yet the overall impact on the operational throughput of the ride over the entire day can be devastating. This creates longer wait times for everyone.
This has led some park operators to employ metal detectors as riders enter the queue. Those who are carrying items are directed to use a set of lockers. Or, leave their items with a non-riding member of the party if available.
When this kind of system has been put to the test, it creates far more efficient operations for the attraction. All riders are prepped and ready to climb aboard the vehicle without delay. This maintains the highest levels of efficiency. It also pushes the operations crew towards their goal of maximum throughput for the day.
There is also one more valuable thing to gain from such a system. It virtually eliminates the possibility of a guest’s loose object from being ejected from a ride vehicle and striking another rider on the train or, even worse, a guest on the ground below the attraction.
I don’t think a season has gone by that there hasn’t been a news article or social media post that goes viral every month about how someone was struck, or there has been a near-miss when a guest has lost control of a personal item on a ride.
A health and safety issue
As you might imagine, the most common culprit in these cases has been the cell phone. Either they fly out of pockets, or even worse, they are used as cameras to record experiences or take selfies. Other items, such as cameras, glasses, keys, hats, wallets, and purses, are also lost.
This isn’t just something you hear about online, as I’ve seen it happen. While riding Magnum XL-200 at Cedar Point, a woman in the front row lost her small purse when the train entered a series of air-time hills towards the end of the ride. As luck would have it, I was riding in the back car. I could reach out and catch the purse in mid-air, mid-airtime-hill, mind you, and return it to her at the station.
The disaster was averted on Magnum that day. But parks have suffered the brunt of countless lawsuits from guests struck by objects falling from the sky above them. So, the addition of a mandatory locker system comes with many positives. The most significant negative to this system, however, comes when a cost is involved.
Being forced to pay to put your stuff in a locker each time you want to go for a ride can be a painful experience for park guests. Especially younger guests who may struggle with the costs. Another factor is the rise of the cashless park experience since the pandemic. Younger children in the parks often don’t have a credit or debit card to pay for these lockers.
Free theme park lockers
The straightforward solution to this has been the path chosen by industry leader Universal Studios. It has offered free locker systems for guests at its major attractions for the past 26 years. I first noticed this when Universal opened the Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando in 1999, where free lockers were available for riders on thrill rides like Incredible Hulk or the Dueling Dragons roller coasters.
Over the years that have followed, it has been standard practice at the Universal Orlando theme parks to offer free temporary lockers for all guests while they wait to ride the park’s biggest thrill rides. The process is smooth and enables the high-profile attractions to run at maximum capacity. This is nothing more than an added bonus to the safety of the park.
The practice has now expanded to a few other parks as well. Disney famously added a free locker system to Walt Disney World for the first time when it opened the new Tron: Lightcycle/Run attraction in early 2023 at the Magic Kingdom. Walt Disney World has also added free lockers outside the Kali River Rapids attraction at the Animal Kingdom theme park.
Meanwhile, Hersheypark in Pennsylvania has also adopted the practice. It offers free temporary lockers for guests when they ride on the best rides and roller coasters in the park. For example, SkyRush, Candymonium, Wildcat’s Revenge, Reese’s CupFusion and sooperdooperLooper.
Benefits for everyone
With all this in mind, I think it may be time for the rest of the parks and attractions to come to the same conclusion. So yes, I’m talking to SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, Cedar Point, Six Flags and everyone else. I believe the investment in such a change will only benefit everyone in the long run.
Instead, I was surprised that Cedar Point did not install such a system when it opened Top Thrill 2. While that particular attraction suffered from technical complications that saw it shut down a few weeks later and kept closed for the remainder of the 2024 season, Top Thrill 2 is precisely the kind of ride that would benefit the most from installing just such a system.
