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elephant58

Hyper Poster
I've just had my first.....and possibly last single rider experience on The Smiler today. So, if you join the single rider queue, it is usually considerably shorter, right?

1) If I'd joined the normal queue I would have gotten on quicker. I had to be at the Towers at 4 and although I was only 2 metres away from the trains, they were letting ONE person through every 10-15 minutes, towards the end! So, in all I queued about an hour for nothing.....

2) .....oh, wait, I know why it was moving so slowly. The ride attendants were chatting, ignoring the fact that several free seats were available during the time they took to have a gossip! :x

I'm really annoyed now! I know I probably shouldn't have been so ignorant and naïve of the fact that I was never going to have an 'easy ride', but I would've expected it to be a little bit better.

So, have anyone ever had a bad single rider experience before and what should we expect when we join these queues?

Thanks! :)
 
In my experience, for a single rider queue to be effective there needs to be at least one of these two things:

1) A short single rider queue
2) Attentive ride ops

You can get by with one without the other, to a point, and the ideal case would be both, but if the line is long and the ops are bad* then single rider will never work.

*Obviously though, ride ops have far more important things to deal with that the single rider line, but if they're able to keep an eye on it as well then it can work well.
 
I've never really had a problem with the Single Rider line, and have usually saved time by using it. You do need to have attentive operators though and in my experience the ops for Oblivion and Nemesis have been most on-the-ball (mind you, the single rider queue for Air is a bit hit-and-miss).

Not been to The Smiler though so I don't know what it's like to compare.
 
I've had experiences similar to yours on Rita and Air. It could be a fault with Alton Towers, but I haven't used single rider lines at many other theme parks. It's the worst when you see people who entered the normal at the same time as you, pass you :x
 
I did single rider for Smiler and while the actual wait time was less than the real queue, it was incredibly slow.
elephant58 said:
oh, wait, I know why it was moving so slowly. The ride attendants were chatting, ignoring the fact that several free seats were available during the time they took to have a gossip! :x
Click to expand...
I noticed this too while they were we were in the station. At one point there were no more people in the regular line inside the station, and there were plenty of empty seats in the trains. Instead of letting in a bunch of single riders to fill things up, they waited around thirty seconds for more people in the regular queue to show up.

On the other hand, the single line for Nemesis and Oblivion were a breeze. There was at least one or two people who were let on every time a new train loaded, unlike the one for Smiler.
 
Never had any problem with a single rider. Did The Smiler one last time I went and it was fine apart from someone blowing chunks over my seat.
 
I've had a poor experience on the smilers single rider, but I had a great experience earlier on the same day. No bad ops, just unlucky with groups of 2 and 4 for an hour.
On the other hand I've had walk on single rider at Europa on Wodan and a couple of quick waits for Blue Fire and one really long wait, again, groups of 2 and 4.
Never had a real issue with ride ops, just unlucky.
 
^yeah when we went single rider the main queue was like 2.5 hours, we didn't even queue for 30 minutes in the single rider queue. Was great.
 
My bad experience was at Disneyland. Splash Mountain had a 65 minute wait and we waited 55 in the single rider line. The workers barely called any over and it was awful. It was a waste of time. However Radiator Springs was a 65 minute wait and we got on in under 5. It was awesome.
 
Agree a lot with Hixee, attentive ride ops and short queue are definite factors that can improve the single rider experience.

An additional factor I would add is being a single rider for a ride with more than two seats per row, such as B&M's four seat rows. This creates a number of seat vacancies for odd numbered parties, while also increasing the number of seats per ride. All of that improves your odds of being able to ride in a shorter amount of time.

The best single rider experience I have ever had is with Riddler's Revenge at SFMM. While the normal queue can exceed two and a half hours, the single rider queue has never been longer than half an hour.
 
It really can be hit or miss depending on the ride capacity and the grouper. Whenever I was a grouper at rides like the Hulk I utilized the single rider for every odd group. Other groupers will group a train mixing and matching odd groups from the regular line reducing space for single riders.

Rides with 2 across seating are much tougher as any odd combination is getting split up anyways, so you could conceivably have little to no use for a single rider. I see this happen a lot on Rip Ride Rocket.
 
Single rider is pointless, and nearly always leads to abuse from vile, ignorant 12 year olds who think they'll get on quicker. They should get rid of them and encourage proactive loading. Simply asking for single riders would be better than making them wait.
 
It's working on the new Harry potter ride though. Main queue is 4 hours single is 2 hours.

Also worked well on Crush in Paris, the main queue was 90 mins single 30. The queue on some rides is narrow and getting people past can be hard and cause a delay.
 
Single rider works brilliantly at Disney and Universal parks. I've walked onto rides with 90 minute queues at every one I've been to. The longest one was Crush in Paris: 25 minutes on a two hour line.

Other places are very hit and miss though.
 
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