roomraider
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In the final section I decided to take a quick look at theme parks themselves before goofing around a bit. There are also a few graphs which I didn't feel provided useful information but were at least interesting. One graph was produced in response to a comment posted about the graphs in part 2.
To get us started the graph below simply shows the number of operating parks on each continent.
Being the largest continent it's not surprising Asia has by far the largest amount of parks, Europe is surprisingly high and North America is third. I suspect the fact that the USA is the only park heavy country in North America is probably the reason it's third behind Europe, A continent which is composed of many smaller but park rich countries.
Using the statistics we've already dug up on the number of rides we can calculate the average number of rides per park as shown in the graph below.
Here North America finishes top by a significant margin and is the only continent to break an average of two coasters per park. Australia has a surprisingly strong showing here with their few parks notching up only slightly fewer coasters on average than Asia. Obviously the minimum average possible here is 1 as the RCDB only lists parks which have a coaster. (There are a couple of operating parks which no longer have a coaster but they only exert a minimum influence).
I took this one step further and split it down into the countries we had in part one.
Denmark excels here and is miles ahead of everyone else on the list. (If there is a country with a higher average I haven't found it yet) Several countries average 2 or more coasters per park while most countries on the graph average over 1.5. As with some of the graphs in part 1 it's worth noting that if countries such as Senegal or Tajikistan were included they would only obtain an average of 1.00.
The RCDB also lists parks which are under construction at the moment. The locations of these are shown in the graph below.
Asia dominates this graph with the majority of new parks going to China. The list is probably not massively accurate as parks under construction often won't be added to the database until coasters are confirmed by the parks themselves. Hopefully though it gives an idea of the rough trend around the world right now.
While there are plenty of parks under construction there are also some sat around rotting away. The RCDB also lists SBNO parks and coasters. The following two graphs show which continents currently have the most.
While these graphs don't really provide useful information they are at least quite interesting and do make me a little sad. For the record I imagine information on African parks is lacking so the numbers are probably be inaccurate. I would be interested to know how many of these SBNO coasters are at currently operating parks.
The RCDB gives info on one last thing in this area. The database lists all the coaster companies currently operating around the world. It's possible to split this down by continent and the results can be seen in the graph below.
In this era of globalisation this probably doesn't mean a whole lot as companies have the ability to manufacturer where they want. B&M have a facility in the USA despite being a European company while S&S are an American company yet manufactured Dinoconda in China. However it's nice to see both the USA and Europeans doing strongly here. I'm willing to bed the number of Asian companies has increased rapidly in recent years.
And for the final serious bit, kailisun98 on Themeparkreview mentioned (in response to the total company coaster count graph in section 2) that the only reason Intamin have a higher number of coasters overall is because they have been around longer. It certainly seems plausible but It got me thinking if there was an upper limit to the number of coasters a company could have open at once.
After a certain amount of time coasters will become too old to keep in good condition and will become uneconomically viable. I wondered if there is a point where the number of a company's coasters closing equals the number they open each year and their total coaster count plateaus.
Given the data I had at hand on B&M and Intamin I created a graph showing the total number of coasters that each company had operating (excludes SBNO) any given year. (There's an issue here somewhere as the resulting number of Intamin coasters doesn't quite match up and is out by 4 but it should only make a minimal difference, this could be Coasters on the DB that don't have an exact closing date)
This pretty much disproves my theory and proves kailisun98 correct. B&M caught up in the early 2000's but have dropped back a bit in recent years as Intamins output has increased. I'm still interested to see if the plateu theory will work for coaster companies which have been around longer but the further back I go the less data there is.
Now for a little bit of fun and a graph which shows no meaningful information what so ever. In part one of this set of articles I used population figures to plot the number of people per coaster. Taking the top coaster from Mitch's poll used in section 2 Expedition Geforce, its theoretical maximum throughput of people and the population data I calculated how long it would take for every person in each country to ride it.
Pointless I know but if you queued in China or India you would probably die before you got to the front of the queue.
The RCDB also lists records including the fastest operation coasters in the world. Using this list its possible to calculate how long it would take to get to Mars if you used the worlds fastest coaster Formula Rossa as your mode of interplanetary travel.
So turns out roller coasters wouldn't be the best way to reach mars. OTSR probably wouldn't be conducive to a comfortable experience either. It would only take two months to reach the moon though. So failing a NASA attempt at landing on the moon again we could always use Kingda Ka. (if you ignore escape velocity of course)
So that's it for Statistics this year. If anyone has any comments or requests I'll be happy to look into things (I have another 2 weeks at sea to burn). Hope you enjoyed it. A big thanks to everyone who contributes to the RCDB for the data and for Duane Marden in particular for keeping the whole thing going.
To get us started the graph below simply shows the number of operating parks on each continent.
Being the largest continent it's not surprising Asia has by far the largest amount of parks, Europe is surprisingly high and North America is third. I suspect the fact that the USA is the only park heavy country in North America is probably the reason it's third behind Europe, A continent which is composed of many smaller but park rich countries.
Using the statistics we've already dug up on the number of rides we can calculate the average number of rides per park as shown in the graph below.
Here North America finishes top by a significant margin and is the only continent to break an average of two coasters per park. Australia has a surprisingly strong showing here with their few parks notching up only slightly fewer coasters on average than Asia. Obviously the minimum average possible here is 1 as the RCDB only lists parks which have a coaster. (There are a couple of operating parks which no longer have a coaster but they only exert a minimum influence).
I took this one step further and split it down into the countries we had in part one.
Denmark excels here and is miles ahead of everyone else on the list. (If there is a country with a higher average I haven't found it yet) Several countries average 2 or more coasters per park while most countries on the graph average over 1.5. As with some of the graphs in part 1 it's worth noting that if countries such as Senegal or Tajikistan were included they would only obtain an average of 1.00.
The RCDB also lists parks which are under construction at the moment. The locations of these are shown in the graph below.
Asia dominates this graph with the majority of new parks going to China. The list is probably not massively accurate as parks under construction often won't be added to the database until coasters are confirmed by the parks themselves. Hopefully though it gives an idea of the rough trend around the world right now.
While there are plenty of parks under construction there are also some sat around rotting away. The RCDB also lists SBNO parks and coasters. The following two graphs show which continents currently have the most.
While these graphs don't really provide useful information they are at least quite interesting and do make me a little sad. For the record I imagine information on African parks is lacking so the numbers are probably be inaccurate. I would be interested to know how many of these SBNO coasters are at currently operating parks.
The RCDB gives info on one last thing in this area. The database lists all the coaster companies currently operating around the world. It's possible to split this down by continent and the results can be seen in the graph below.
In this era of globalisation this probably doesn't mean a whole lot as companies have the ability to manufacturer where they want. B&M have a facility in the USA despite being a European company while S&S are an American company yet manufactured Dinoconda in China. However it's nice to see both the USA and Europeans doing strongly here. I'm willing to bed the number of Asian companies has increased rapidly in recent years.
And for the final serious bit, kailisun98 on Themeparkreview mentioned (in response to the total company coaster count graph in section 2) that the only reason Intamin have a higher number of coasters overall is because they have been around longer. It certainly seems plausible but It got me thinking if there was an upper limit to the number of coasters a company could have open at once.
After a certain amount of time coasters will become too old to keep in good condition and will become uneconomically viable. I wondered if there is a point where the number of a company's coasters closing equals the number they open each year and their total coaster count plateaus.
Given the data I had at hand on B&M and Intamin I created a graph showing the total number of coasters that each company had operating (excludes SBNO) any given year. (There's an issue here somewhere as the resulting number of Intamin coasters doesn't quite match up and is out by 4 but it should only make a minimal difference, this could be Coasters on the DB that don't have an exact closing date)
This pretty much disproves my theory and proves kailisun98 correct. B&M caught up in the early 2000's but have dropped back a bit in recent years as Intamins output has increased. I'm still interested to see if the plateu theory will work for coaster companies which have been around longer but the further back I go the less data there is.
Now for a little bit of fun and a graph which shows no meaningful information what so ever. In part one of this set of articles I used population figures to plot the number of people per coaster. Taking the top coaster from Mitch's poll used in section 2 Expedition Geforce, its theoretical maximum throughput of people and the population data I calculated how long it would take for every person in each country to ride it.
Pointless I know but if you queued in China or India you would probably die before you got to the front of the queue.
The RCDB also lists records including the fastest operation coasters in the world. Using this list its possible to calculate how long it would take to get to Mars if you used the worlds fastest coaster Formula Rossa as your mode of interplanetary travel.
So turns out roller coasters wouldn't be the best way to reach mars. OTSR probably wouldn't be conducive to a comfortable experience either. It would only take two months to reach the moon though. So failing a NASA attempt at landing on the moon again we could always use Kingda Ka. (if you ignore escape velocity of course)
So that's it for Statistics this year. If anyone has any comments or requests I'll be happy to look into things (I have another 2 weeks at sea to burn). Hope you enjoyed it. A big thanks to everyone who contributes to the RCDB for the data and for Duane Marden in particular for keeping the whole thing going.
