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Fun With Statistics 2018

roomraider

Best Topic Starter
Howdy all

It’s been 2 years since I did one of these. And somehow a whole 7 years since I did the first one. Part of the reason I haven’t done one in a while is I was short on ideas for new graphs. I was doing a lot of the same “coasters per country” and “people per coaster” graphs each year didn’t change very much.
I didn’t want to repeat same stuff this time so here’s a whole set of random graphs from the coaster industry.

Before I start here are some disclaimers. All stats and numbers used here are from the RCDB, Any errors are mine and mine alone and the older the data is the less accurate it probably is.

Having said that lets get started with a stupid graph.
I copied the entire RCDB list of coasters into an Excel table to do this and god was it slow going. But this graph answers the question everyone has wanted to know for years. If you take every coaster name ever which is the most popular first letter?
Coaster by letter.JPG
So more coaster names begin with the letter S than any other letter. . Having done that lets look at which letter comes last more often than not.
Coaster by last letter.JPG
Strangely R dominates here as well. This says perhaps more about the English language than anything else. But part of the explanation may come from the most popular coaster names of all time.

Here are the 15 most popular coaster names of all time.
Coaster Names.JPG
Roller Coaster just happens to end with an R as does little dipper but pretty much any name that ends with the word Coaster ends in R which may explain the dominance of R in the graph above.

As an aside the RCDB currently has 1663 coasters called “unknown”.

Moving on let’s look at coaster heights. This is a little tough as there are a few possible definitions. I chose to use actual height rather than drop height. So Steel Phantom comes in lower than you might expect where Manhattan Express (or whatever it’s now called) comes slightly higher. But in the grand scheme of things it matters little.

I decided to do a graph showing the tallest coaster that ever existed in any given year. There’s more caveat’s with this than normal. First up Lake Placid Bobsled closed in 1946 so after that other coasters were the tallest in the world at that point. However that’s a much harder graph to do (I may try this in part 2) so this is a graph of the tallest coaster that has ever existed up to that point. Secondly I can’t verify the stat for Giant Coaster at Fuji Q. it certainly was big but if it’s as tall as they say it was then a few tallest coaster in the world claims were wrong. Finally i included shuttles here. If i included Tower Of Terror and Superman i couldn't really leave out Moonsault (sorry Magnum)
Tallest With Shuttle.JPG

I did a 2nd graph removing both Giant Coaster and Shuttles. Which looks like this.
Height Record Excluding Shuttles.JPG

Following that here is a graph showing every 100ft+ coaster ever built by year. The tallest coaster of all time line here is the first one seen above.
100ft ByYear.JPG

There is a very obvious line where Boomerangs get going. Theres a fairly good trend of increasing height over time though. Despite the fact the tallest coaster yet was built 13 years ago (that makes me feel old)

Going from height let’s move onto inversions. This graph shows the total number of inversions that have ever existed at the end of each year. Quite a nice curve on this one.
Coasters with inversion per year.jpg
We can take that and plot every coaster with inversions ever built and plot them by year and number of inversions. There is again a caveat here as rides like Demon at CGA were built with 2 inversions but now have 4, The DB only has the current number of inversions so rides like demons are slightly in the wrong place. (I would fix this but the graph is so slow it now crashes excel every time I edit it)
Inversions by Year.JPG

Done with inversions now let’s do a more traditional chart. Where are all the B&Ms going? Currently only Asia, Europe and North America have B&M’s. B&M are yet to break in to the lucrative Antarctica market. But where are they built?
B&M per continent.JPG
1999 was quite a year for B&M in the USA but less so this year. Asia however was quiet for years but now where when B&M do most of their work. Well this year anyway.
I think it’s fairly interesting that B&M seem to have a fairly big year followed by quiet one. A kind of wave pattern.

I also decided to look at 2 of the most recent boom countries in terms of coasters. Indonesia and Vietnam are seeing a LOT of new coasters right now. Here is a graph showing all new coasters in those countries per year.
Coaster Booms.JPG
The Indonesia jump is obviously due to Transmart and their ridiculous Vekoma junior binge.
Next I decided to look at all coasters built each year around the world. Note that 2017 and 2018 won’t be fully complete yet and also with this graph if any ride said “XXXX or earlier” or “XXXX or later” for an opening date XXXX was used as its date.
Coaster Per Year.JPG

We can then break that down to Steel and Wood coasters as well
Wood Vs Steel per year.JPG
Whichever way you look at it we are living in a golden age at the moment. Even if that golden age is probably mostly Golden Horse inverted coasters and mice.
That’s mostly it for now. I hope to do a part 2 if I can sort out enough interesting or weird things to look at. For now I will leave you with some useless stats.
Useless stats.JPG
 
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HeartlineCoaster

Theme Park Superhero
The idea of half an inversion intrigues me:
Stations that could accomodate both upside down and right way up trains. Flyers would be the least gruesome choice for guests.
A sit down that turns into an invert.
 

TilenB

Strata Poster
Oh, I always enjoy reading these!

I did a 2nd graph removing both Giant Coaster and Shuttles. Which looks like this.
height-record-excluding-shuttles-jpg.2422
A bit of a correction here, Wiener Looping was a shuttle too.
 

Matt N

CF Legend
Interesting charts indeed. I had an interesting look at the B&M one, and some of you may be interested to know that it shows that B&M's best European years were 2002 and 2012, with 2018 also looking quite good.

Anyway, thank you @roomraider for putting in the effort to do these charts. They are a very interesting read!
 
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