The walk back from the far end of the park when the ride you came for is closed is familiar to anyone who has spent a July weekend at Cedar Point. The sign at the queue entry informs you that the ride is temporarily unavailable once you have traversed the entire site, past the funnel cakes, souvenir shops, and the lesser coasters you will ultimately come to. There is no time estimate. No justification. You make your way back. It may or may not open later. For almost all of the big American theme parks’ existence, it has been the arrangement.
A rather direct attempt to alter that agreement is Ohio House Bill 488. Large amusement parks in the state would have to update ride availability on digital signage and apps within five minutes of a closure or reopening under the Real-Time Ride Status Notification Act. Although the bill’s language is sufficiently wide to apply to any qualifying park business, Cedar Point and Kings Island are the state’s obvious targets. It’s not a difficult criterion. The public-facing information systems have five minutes to update if a ride goes down.
What the legislation reveals about the current state of affairs is what makes this intriguing and has lawmakers in other states taking notice. Real-time ride status tracking is already available in theme parks. They do this for operational reasons: safety records need timestamped logs of operational status, managers need to know what has been closed and for how long, and maintenance crews need to know what is operating. There is data. It is continuously recorded. The bill just suggests that those who paid for admittance ought to be permitted to view it as well.
The bill has a certain legislative elegance because of its wording, which calls for the sharing of information that already exists rather than adding a new monitoring burden. Parks’ claim that they lack the information is implausible. They can debate privacy, proprietary systems, and the practical difficulty of real-time integration of internal status feeds into apps that are accessible to the public. However, those are not arguments against the fundamental premise; rather, they are implementation issues. This is the precise model used by public transportation apps and airline status displays. In real time, a delayed flight is recorded, sent, and shown. Although flawed, the parallel is not irrational.
Enforcement is handled by the Ohio Department of Agriculture, which is helpful since it currently conducts safety inspections of amusement parks in the state. Administrative friction is significantly reduced by integrating the real-time status requirement into an already-existing regulatory relationship as opposed to establishing a new agency or oversight mechanism. The bill has real teeth thanks to civil penalties for noncompliance, which consumer advocacy groups have pointed out are the distinction between a suggestion and a transparency requirement.
Other states are more interested in the model it represents than in the particular mechanism. Safety has always been the main focus of theme park regulations, including ride inspections, accident reporting, and operator training. This bill adds basic consumer communication to the list of topics covered by state regulations. That is a significant change in the way lawmakers view the entertainment industry’s accountability. The argument argues that visitors should have access to the same level of operational transparency as they would when checking a flight status or a train departure board if they are spending several hundred dollars for a family day at a big park.
