43 replies to this topic

[Lift Dinosaur]

Unfortunately the lifts were designed and purchased for the paying customer, not the paid maintenance staff. Therefore the lifts should run at or near design speed.
NOW, if the maintenance staff is being pressured by Management, who originally purchased the design ( and thusly the repair due to parts wear), to reduce maintenance costs Management needs to be informed of the inconvenience to the customer.
Just my $.02
Dino

[NHskier13]

In the Springtime, I find that HSQ's near me run a lot slower, such as the Panorama @ Gunstock, which can do up to 1015 (Normally runs around 950, and even then it stops and slows a ton)
run at around 800. I read somewhere that tires in the terminal are affected by higher temps or something along those lines, but the reason why they slow it to 800 or so is probably because most people would rather be at Winnipesaukee in 75 degree weather than out skiing... more for me I guess :P

[snoloco]

I agree with what Lift Dinosaur and Yooperskier said. Except for beginner lifts, everything should be run at the full speed at which weather conditions allow. This is the policy at certain mountains such as Killington and I think that it is a good one to follow.

[liftmech]

Tires are definitely affected by temperature changes (as are the ones on your car) but I don't see that affecting lift speed.

[snoloco]

Lift Dinosaur, on 11 January 2015 - 03:30 PM, said:

Unfortunately the lifts were designed and purchased for the paying customer, not the paid maintenance staff. Therefore the lifts should run at or near design speed.
NOW, if the maintenance staff is being pressured by Management, who originally purchased the design ( and thusly the repair due to parts wear), to reduce maintenance costs Management needs to be informed of the inconvenience to the customer.
Just my $.02
Dino

So it would be like this using Mountain Creek as an example? (I'm just playing out two scenarios, they are not meant to assume anything about the people who work there.)

Scenario 1: Lift Maintenance wants to have less work to do on the lifts. They turn them down to 800fpm midweek to reduce wear and tear. This decision is not run by management and people notice the dreadfully slow lifts and complain about it to management and they don't know anything about it.

Scenario 2: Management notices rising maintenance costs on the detachable lifts. They tell lift maintenance to reduce maintenance costs. Lift Maintenance tells them that they can save costs by reducing grip cycles if they turn the lifts down to 800fpm. They say that this will mean a slower ride and could frustrate customers. Management either tells them to do that, or keep the lifts running at full design speed.

I don't know if either of these happened at Mountain Creek or if their policy even follows these at all. I only know that they routinely run their HSQ's and Cabriolet dreadfully slow on certain days when weather would allow a faster operation. This is frustrating as it seriously limits the number of runs the paying customers can take.

[DonaldMReif]

Possibly related, but the Breck superchairs all run around 1,000 fpm under normal conditions. The exception is the Independence SuperChair, which I think is the sole one of the superchairs to run at around 1,100 fpm. Of course, they only started running the Independence SuperChair at the higher speed last year, and doing so did shave about 30 seconds off the ride time when I compare two different videos of the lift running with no stops, with the ride time being from the second the chair grip exits the bottom terminal to when it detaches from the cable at the top.

Here's a video of the lift from the season before the Kensho SuperChair was built:
https://www.youtube....h?v=DKnstYi1WUs

As you can see, the ride time is 7.5 minutes. Now compare that to this video of the Independence SuperChair that was filmed a few days before the Kensho SuperChair first opened to the public: https://www.youtube....h?v=nVO-JyO32Zw

That appears to have been an operational decision to run the lift at what I think was the lift's design speed.

[Lift Dinosaur]

snoloco, on 11 January 2015 - 05:56 PM, said:

Scenario 1: Lift Maintenance wants to have less work to do on the lifts. They turn them down to 800fpm midweek to reduce wear and tear. This decision is not run by management and people notice the dreadfully slow lifts and complain about it to management and they don't know anything about it.

Scenario 2: Management notices rising maintenance costs on the detachable lifts. They tell lift maintenance to reduce maintenance costs. Lift Maintenance tells them that they can save costs by reducing grip cycles if they turn the lifts down to 800fpm. They say that this will mean a slower ride and could frustrate customers. Management either tells them to do that, or keep the lifts running at full design speed.

I don't know if either of these happened at Mountain Creek or if their policy even follows these at all. I only know that they routinely run their HSQ's and Cabriolet dreadfully slow on certain days when weather would allow a faster operation. This is frustrating as it seriously limits the number of runs the paying customers can take.

While I no longer work at a Ski Resort, someone that does will correct me.
1) Ain't going to happen. Lift Maintenance does not operate separately from the Resort and as such does not unilaterally make these decisions. These decisions are made by the Mountain Operations Team taking all things such as wind, demand, caliber of skiers / riders, etc. 800fpm is not "dreadfully slow"- a fixed grip double running at 375fpm IS.

2) Seems more real. Once again, all things are considered- time of day / week relating to crowd size, wind, weather, staff,caliber of skiers / riders, etc. etc.etc. Same thing goes for closing certain lifts during the week.

"Seriously limits the number of runs...one can make"' If a 4000' long lift runs at 1000 fpm for 8 hours (480 minutes) and it takes you 5 minutes to ski down to the bottom, you will get 53.3 runs in if you don't stop all day. If it runs at 800fpm you will get 48 runs. Seriously limits?????

Bottom line- lifts are run to maximize efficiency. If it takes less energy, less slows and stops, less maintenance to operate a lift at 800-900 fpm during the week then that may be the best solution.
Dino

This post has been edited by Lift Dinosaur: 11 January 2015 - 07:06 PM

[SkiDaBird]

I'm a little biased in that we never see lifts run at full speed in Utah, but it doesn't really affect the time. That one extra minute may feel really cold on LC if weather is bad, but you also signed up for 10 min on the traverse. If you are trying to max vertical, sure it might be a little annoying but over the course of the day it really doesn't add up too much. If we ballpark at 1 min per ride, assuming a max of 30 rides, thats only a half hour, which is about equal to lunch. My friend and I did 70,000 vertical with Peruvian in the 900 range. It's not an issue.

[Kicking Horse]

After being at a mountain where the HS lifts runs anywhere from 3.5 to 4 meters / sec I must say it reduces the number of slows and stops.

Plus if it's super cold out the faster the lift the colder the people get....

Just food for thought. Speed of lift does have direct relation on number of slows and stops!

[RibStaThiok]

why do they never run the lifts at full speed in Utah?

[Lift Dinosaur]

RibStaThiok, on 12 January 2015 - 07:35 PM, said:

why do they never run the lifts at full speed in Utah?

That's kind of a blanket statement. Do you mean all lifts in Utah do not run at full speed?
Dino

[SkiDaBird]

Lift Dinosaur, on 13 January 2015 - 05:48 AM, said:

That's kind of a blanket statement. Do you mean all lifts in Utah do not run at full speed?
Dino

He was responding to a comment I made. The never was an exaggeration, on very high skier traffic days they do operate at full speed. Mind you, I'd estimate that to be less than 5 days every year. I also can't make any statements regarding any of the PC places on high traffic days as I have only skied them midweek.

[snoloco]

I recently timed the South Peak Express at Mountain Creek and realized that it was going more like 600-700 fpm many days rather than 800 fpm. I don't know why they run it so ridiculously slow now. Last year it was 800-900 midweek and 900-950 on weekends. This year it's like 600-700 midweek and about 700-800 most of the day on weekends. If you get lucky, maybe it runs over 800. I don't know why the stupid thing runs so slowly now. It can't be because of too many beginners because that lift serves only intermediate terrain and terrain parks. That lift is relatively shielded from the wind and it runs the same slow speed on sunny clear days as well, so weather can't be the issue. Who knows, maybe there's something wrong with it.

The lift right next to it serves similar difficulty terrain and was running at least 800fpm most days this season. It is much shorter at 3,200 feet long vs 5,500 for the lift mentioned above. Makes little sense to me that the longer lift is run slower than the shorter one.

[mikest2]

It's the balance................ a two minute stop is 3% of your capacity, slows are negligible in capacity loss. If you have 6 - 2 minute stops an hour, that's 20% of your capacity. That's the same as running at 4.0 m/s with no stops (on a 5.0 m/s lift) If you monitor your stops, on Monday, you'll have more than Tuesday, Tuesday, more than Wednesday, by Friday, almost none at all ( destination resort)
It's all about capacity. Liners, bushings, bearings and grip parts are cheap. Labour is expensive, so is down time. Compare your lift maintenance budget to the marketing budget, and ask them for hard numbers to justify their expenses. You run your lifts as fast as you can to maximize capacity. Having said that, we find it difficult to exceed 4.8 m/s on most of our detaches. The exception being one that doesn't really service any beginner terrain, it routinely runs at better than 5 m/s.
Maintenance is rarely the reason, passenger competence is, but we are here to make our guest's experience the best it can be, so if the lift stops, or runs slow, who cares, everyone is having fun.

[snoloco]

Contrary to what I see at Mountain Creek where the lift runs so slowly it is almost like a fixed grip, the Kaatskill Flyer at Hunter Mountain stops frequently when it runs at full speed. One day recently, they had to slow it to about 900 fpm for wind and it hardly stopped at all. Maybe it makes more sense to run at that speed then.

[NHskier13]

I find that lifts like the Sunburst Six at Okemo have a lot of stops and slows because of these factors:
1. You need to get off while avoiding 5 other people
2. Lots of people park their butts right in front of the unload ramp, and you need to dodge them too
3. The ramp is too steep for some people
4. Sometimes (rarely) you can actually get stuck or lose a pole and try to dig it out while unloading
Of all the times I've been at the terminal when a lift stopped, there is a 4:1 ratio of stops/slows due to unloading errors to misloads.
I think if the lift is slower (though I can't wrap my head around not being able to load/unload a lift at 250 fpm, lol) then people have more time to load and unload, and like mike said it's better for your capacity if you run slower. I actually wish lifts like Panorama at Gunstock (which stops a lot mid-day) ran slower in the middle of the day. That's probably the one lift where i've seen more misloads at the bottom than at the top, because at the top the chair goes to a nearly complete stop, then starts moving faster again.

[DonaldMReif]

Well, six packs do stop aplenty for reason 1 (six people trying to load or unload together), although that's more likely to happen IME on beginner six packs like Quicksilver Super6 as opposed to six packs that do not serve beginner terrain, like the Kensho SuperChair.

As for reason 2, people parking their butts in front of the unload ramp forcing unloading guests to dodge them, I believe that seems to be more of a people not behaving properly. Perhaps Okemo needs to put up a sign that says "Clear Unload Area Promptly". I know, for example, that Breck has a number of those signs on several of its double chairlifts, like Lift 5 and Lift C. I think there are even a few on a couple of the superchairs (Imperial, I think, because of the narrow amount of room to move around that exists at that point on the ridge).

This post has been edited by DonaldMReif: 21 March 2015 - 08:52 AM

[RibStaThiok]

Put up a "NO STOP" zone or a "NO STOPPING IN THIS ZONE, CLEAR THE UNLOAD ZONE IMMEDIATLY"

[DonaldMReif]

RibStaThiok, on 21 March 2015 - 10:11 AM, said:

Put up a "NO STOP" zone or a "NO STOPPING IN THIS ZONE, CLEAR THE UNLOAD ZONE IMMEDIATLY"

As I said, Breckenridge has signs that say "Clear Unload Area Promptly" on a number of fixed grip lifts. Like Lift 5 (photo by skierdude; taken off remontees-mecaniques):
 Lift 5 Unloading.jpg (66.21K)
Number of downloads: 29

[2milehi]

DonaldMReif, on 07 April 2014 - 05:24 AM, said:

I am certain it has to do with the fact that Breckenridge realized that the Independence SuperChair was going to receive a lot more skier traffic as you must use the lift to get back to Peak 8 base after you are done lapping the Kensho SuperChair.

Not true. One can get on the gondola at Peak 7 and ride over to Peak 8 base and swing on by to the T-Bar.