Seat belts on Coasters

[NightRider785]

My apologies if this is a repeat.
I seem to remember going on the Viper and AE back in the day and not seeing seat belts in them.
I know they have been there for a few years at least, but when I asked a maintenance guy, he said they have always been there. To say the least, I don't believe him.
Does anyone know when they added the seat belts?
I know it wasn't just them because King's Island in Ohio seemed to have them on all the wooden coasters as well.

[FParker185]

Yeah, American Eagle had no seat belts and technically Viper didn't either (the brackets were there as they came equipped with them from PTC but SFGAm removed them for capacity purposes). PTC always recommended them but stopped short of requiring them. I'm not sure if PTC requires them now, but after the Tamar Fellner incident at Holiday World all PTC's everywhere got them. Could be the insurance companies asking for those or could be a mandatory thing from PTC. Could be worse, Paramount added automatic retracting seatbelts on their PTC's, they are a pain in the ass

Also PTC considers the seat belt the primary restraining device, lapbar is secondary.

[SFaddiction84]

SeatBelts: You can blame those individuals who like to leave there lapbar to loose, and fool around with there lapbar while there locking, lapbar fails or its just to loose and WOOPS, kid flies out on hill and makes a nice Life Like print on the ground below. Family Sues Because god for bid there kid caused trouble and now you have Seat Belts on your rides.

[BP317]

They were added to Eagle, Viper, Condor, and ERC in 2004. They were also added to Columbia Carousel later that season and were taken off for 2007.

[coasterkidd100]

^The workers are supposed to make sure that the lap bars are down all of the way but they don't always do a good job. Somtimes when I am on a coaster they just walk up and tap the lap bar.

[Nystagmus]

^ There are a lot of guests that try to leave the lapbar up as high as they can. I would ask several guests each day to put their leg down so I could lower their lapbar. They would leave their leg up to make it seem like the lapbar had reached its limit.

The worst I had was when I worked at Viper (pre-seatbelt era). A woman boarded and literally put her lapbar down two or three clicks: not very much. I told her that I needed to lower her lapbar some more before I would dispatch the train. She got all huffy and puffy and says "Well I'm a member of ACE! So you better not put my lapbar down!"

So, being my then-17-year-old self, I went on a power trip and stepped on her lapbar to get it down as far as it could go. I looked at her and said, "That's a lesson to all of your ACE friends who don't know how to safely ride my coaster."

It was an a**hole thing for me to do and say, but I was not letting her go with a good 10 inches of open space between her and the lapbar.

[NightRider785]

^I'd say it was indeed a good call. But what you could have done was tell her very loudly that the train would not be dispatched until her lap bar was down all the way, thereby turning the entire train of people and the people in line against her because they want their ride. Haha, she would have to listen or be destroyed by an angry mob!

[Nystagmus]

^ You have to remember I was a teenager then: my logic and reasoning skills didn't work so well.

But now, some decade later, I would have embarrassed her as much as possible. The same way I embarrass other adults who make a huge fuss about pricing errors in grocery stores.

[Ilovthevu']

^ Concerning prices, don't go the Wal-Mart in Hodgkins, IL because 3 times already they were going to charge more money for three items as compared to the prices on the shelf.

For the Racer coaster at Kings Island, the lapbars are terrible. That leads to little airtime on that ride.