Theme Park Discussion / Fun With Statistics 2012

Hey guys
I do this every year but it is becoming harder and harder to find new statistics each year...
So I will probably update this with new things as I think of them/when people suggest them

Anyhow here's a couple of new ones

This is the number of coasters over the last 20 years build vs the number closed. As you will notice we are always in the positive.


2000 was clearly a great year for coasters but 2007 despite being the 2nd highest for number of new coasters in the last 20 years it also had the most number of coasters closed.

Notably the number new coasters is reasonably consistent where as the number closing coasters seems to be shrinking slightly. This goes against how i thought the economic crisis would work.

I began to wonder how this broke down continentally so the graph below shows the % of coasters opened in each year belonging to Asia and America.


As many people here will be more interested in Europe here is the same graph but replacing America with Europe


I find this quite interesting as the recent Chinese coaster boom massively influences the Asian graph and starts to kick in in 2009 where there is also a severe drop off in American coasters. I wonder what caused this? I suppose each Manufacturer has a finite # of coasters they can build each year. If they are being built in Asia they can't be built in the US?

Finally I wondered if wooden coasters were affected by the Chinese boom so below are wooden coasters built over the last 20 years.


The most interesting thing here... 2000 had 16 new woodies... 7 of those are closed already. Which is pretty shocking really

Going a bit more general we have the top roller-coaster owning countries



This clearly puts the US top with China 2nd and the UK sits a pretty good 4th. However this next graph shows the population according to the last census (mostly 2011 but occasionally slightly older) against the number of coasters. The lower the number the better as in theory you don't have to queue so long.



So the moral of the story is if you like coasters don't live in Inida... but Denmark (and Scandinavia in general) does OK.

HOWEVER........ does that tell the whole story? Below is a graph showing the Number of Total Area Of Country/Number Of Coasters.... In theory the higher the number the less far you have to travel to ride a roller coaster.



The Netherlands wins that battle but you may have noticed the UK does pretty well across the board.... SO STOP COMPLAINING



More soon

Cheers
Dave

How is it possible that over 100 roller coasters are being opened annually when we only hear about two or three?

^Smaller coasters (like caterpillar rides or boardwalk style coasters) technically count. The one's we hear about are just the from major brand names at major parks around the world. Check RCDB and look at the "New For 2013" section, there are more than 100 there.

It'd be interesting to see some sort of correlation graph of year built where they rank on the mitch hawker polls.

This was pretty cool! =D I never really see stuff like this.

This data would have been SOOO HELPFUL for my essay in my Housing Crisis class. I looked at whether entertainment industries (Film and Amusement Park) were majorly affected by the U.S. Housing Crisis. Fun read Roomie. funny how easy boring stats can be when you are obsessed with the subject, lol

FK

It suprises me that China has so much RC. And it's interesting that the rank of amount of RC in a country is just like the rank of GDP.