2 replies to this topic

[MarkV]

I thought I'd try your forum to ask a question I had posted on Epic ski.

What I wanted to know is the logic or computation that is behind signs I've seen at Vail and at Breckenridge announcing replacement of detachable quads with six-packs. What's puzzles me is the claim on the sign that this will be a 25% increase in capacity. Ever since I skied with leather boots and cable bindings, 6 is 50% more than 4. I've counted the number of seconds between chairs on 4 and 6 seat chairs at areas such as Breckenridge, Copper, Vail, and Keystone and on a fully equipped lift, it's about 7-8" regardless.

There are certainly some exceptions to this such as Imperial Express at Breckenridge where, for some reason, they spaced the chairs about 12 seconds apart. My guess is that it was a move to either save some money or deliberately limit the number of skiers deposited at the smallish landing area.

So, does anyone have an explanation for the funny math?

Corollary question (too much time on my hands, I know) is do the conveyor belt loaders with starting gates on many new six packs really cut down on "misloads" and stoppage? As I'm sure you know Breckenridge has what i am told is the only double loading six pack in the world. Or at least the US. How has that worked out?

Thanks for putting up your site and putting up with retired people like me with insatiable curiosity.

Mark V

[2milehi]

At Keystone, Montezuma is a 2400 PPH chair lift. If you get a stop watch and time 10 chairs, you'll see that each chair has a 6.0 second interval (I have timed this 10's of times). That is 10 chairs a minute or 600 an hour.

The new lift at Keystone should have a chair interval of 8.3 seconds to give 3000 PPH or a 25% increase.

I know Falcon runs a 900 feet per minute. As for stops on the carpets, most Americans aren't use to the load carpet and the fall down when loading. It is another source of stops. Quicksilver is pretty good at getting people on the lift with a 14 second load interval.

[Kelly]

MarkV - You’re almost there conceptual wise…
Riblet (even though out of business) has a nice explanation of the basics of chair capacity: http://www.riblet.com/lift.htm
The ropeway industry (designers and maintainers) recognize for each addition in the number of riders per carrier the theoretical capacity has to have a correction factor for actual capacity. This correction factor is for skier (ski) ability, load ability and unload ability.
As 2mile mentions a loading carpet is sometimes used to offset those (in)abilities.
All that stuff (the correction factor) changes by day and as the season progresses.
Yes, a six seater has a higher potential capacity… and a higher marketing value.
“See, our amp volume goes to 11…”

Quote

…What's puzzles me is the claim on the sign…

This is marketing gobbledygook* - this not a slam on the marketing folks, as they have little training on basic math or little use for capacity correction factors…this is why they went into marketing.

*Gobbledygook: A term or phrase that is made unintelligible by excessive use of abstruse technical terms.