What do statistics about road accidents tell us about operating theme park rides?
Neil Wilson
Theme park safety consultant for Universal Verification and author of Absolute Efficiency books.
I’ve just been reading an article on the BBC website about road traffic accidents. The amount of research on theme park accidents tends to be limited and rely either on small data sizes, or unrepresentative samples and self-reporting. We have to be careful about taking conclusions from research into road accidents and assuming the findings apply to theme parks, because the circumstances are different. But because there’s so much more data, it’s worth at least considering it. These statistics are taken from the UK.
Firstly, the more passengers there are in a car, the more likely the driver is to crash, and this is particularly true for ‘young’ drivers with other ‘young’ drivers in the car. I doubt any of us will find this surprising, but the research does seem to back up what we’ve all suspected.
There are probably different ways that passengers can distract us, including general distractions, encouraging us to take more risk, or backseat driving which can create confusion, a diffusion of responsibility, or anger.
Secondly, men under the age of 25 are 4 times more likely to be convicted of reckless or dangerous driving than the average driver, and 4 times more likely to be seriously injured or killed in a car accident.
I suspect men under the age of 25 make up a significant proportion of ride operators in many theme parks.
I’ve heard many theme parks argue that the more confident someone is, the safer they will be at their job. For example, they argue that confident ride operators are more likely to enforce restrictions whereas a less confident ride operator is more likely to let someone break the rules. Similarly, the argument is that the more confident a manager is, the more likely they are to discipline staff who aren’t doing their jobs properly.
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Whilst these are valid arguments, over-confidence seems to be more common in accidents than a lack of confidence, although both have the potential to cause an accident. For example, a driver who dithers pulling out of a junction might get hit by another car. Nonetheless, over-confidence often comes from risk seeking behaviour and an inability to accurately predict risks.
Assessments for ride operators and ride managers typically try to find the most confident people, but if that means our rides are being run by excessive risk takers, then that might not be a good thing.
Even in the field of road safety many reports aren’t based on enough people to have strong validity. For example, there were two separate studies of 2,000 drivers. One found that people who passed first time were the safest, while the other found that people who passed third time were the safest. Both studies drew different conclusions, but we’d need to do more research and use a bigger sample size to know whether either of them are actually valid.
This is the kind of challenge we have with operational issues. With the engineering side it’s often easier to objectively show what’s safer, for example by measuring forces or material strength etc. With operations there are various theories about what is or isn’t safer, but when it comes to things like recruitment or training, it’s often quite hard to find the evidence to back them up.
At Universal Verification we try to find as much evidence as we can to back up what we're doing and continually questions assumptions. Research is never perfect, and new research may always challenge what you're doing. Nonetheless, people who use all the research available tend to have a pretty good batting average. Being an expert doesn't mean you're a clairvoyant, but it does mean that you can consider different possibilities and look at them critically.