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Yeah I had the same concern as well but decided to take the risk. If you're willing to put in some work I don't think they could ever completely lock us out. There would always be the dirty option of an android emulator + gps spoofing software. I've also looked into a couple weather API's for future use. Right now my tentative plan is to collect data over the summer months and start pulling in other sources of information over the winter in order to build a better forecaster for ride times. Once I get to that point getting your data for SFOT could be useful to see how much an additional year of data changes things. I do like the UI you used to show the historical data though!

The issue was actually a bug in my system with how I was uploading rides to the database... should be fixed now!

I'll check it out. Its very possible I missed one. Most of the initial data for that was entered manually via a combination of Wikipedia and the parks websites. Let me know which ones specifically you have noticed and I'll add them. Even if the park doesn't report the times users can still submit them manually (although this method hasn't seen much use yet )

I have a git right now but its private. I could consider opening it up so for people to help with updates to the GUI and such. My biggest fear is that I'm hosting on google app engine at the moment so its not free. Pulling down the historical wait times right now costs me a couple dollars just due to the volume of database accesses. There may be a cheaper way to store the info but I haven't had time to look into it. It may be possible to pull down a snapshot now and setup a canned environment for developers to test with though... let me look into this.

I've had many thoughts along that line. The only issue is for any of that you really need the parks permission to set them up and the phone will need a specific app to detect the beacon. Really IMO the better solution would be an 2 arduino boards with IR distance sensors. Once across the queue entrance to track visitor entries. The second to detect a train as it leaves the station. You could then get a rough estimate of the input vs output of people. This would really give you a much better 'live' view of the system vs an estimate based on how long the line is.

First off, this is amazing and should be a great tool for the coaster community, especially a whore like myself who will try and fly in and out of a city on the same day to get stuff done. Just to try and push the envelope, are you able to get a lens on date, or even month? A Tuesday at the start of the season in May will be way different from say, July 5th. As an analyst in real life I would love to be able to slice the data that way. That is my eventual goal but I've only just started collecting data. Once I get a season under my belt I can start building more detailed data slicing. I also had a suggestion to pair this up with weather data. The "dream" would be an interface where a user could input some sort of date range like Monday, July, Sunny and get a rough idea of what the wait breakdown would be.

For all the whentoride advocates. The first step in a long journey has been made. Historical averages on a day-of-the-week basis: CoasterQueue - Maverick Details

If anyone is still following this thread another update was made to CoasterQueue which allows users to view historical averages on a 'day-by-day' basis. For now you can select the day of the week and see the average wait times across all Mondays/Tuesdays etc. You have to go into the ride details to view it though. This is what it looks like for Millenium Force. The data driving this is a bit limited at the moment so the times may not be a true reflection. As time goes on they should get better.

I'm aware of that. My website just doesn't require you to be in the park to view the data . Also I'm slowly adding in historical data viewing to the site. For example, each ride you can now see the average wait times on a daily basis. http://coasterqueue.com/rides/5716646702350336 The #1 question I always see online is "what will the wait times be like tomorrow". I'm hoping to provide answers to that question in the long run, but I need data first to back it up! So right now what you see in my site is only using data from the last couple weeks.

Yeah I'm trying to get the word out as much as I can and this thread shows up pretty high on google search results so... haha Some of the data comes from user submissions and some I pull from the same source as the mobile apps if they have enabled wait times. So far that's most of the Six Flags parks and the major cedar fair ones. Thus far most of the data comes from the parks. I'm in the process of adding historical data viewing for each ride as well. That is taking a bit longer than I expected it to...

I know this post is old, but it google search ranking is fairly high. Check out CoasterQueue, they have cedar point in their database for wait times. No history yet, but the about page says that is in the works. You can still view the current wait time.

Glad to help. Now just spread the word!!

Correct, Currently I'm just pulling from the respective parks API. However the more data I can get the better!

OR you can go to CoasterQueue and save yourself the hassle of downloading an additional app and spoofing the location! Six flags data pulling went live yesterday. There may be a couple small bugs I will need to work in the next few days, but overall things seem to be working. Not all the six flags parks are open yet, so this weekend will be the real test to see if all the data is coming through.

Next time you're there consider entering your times into my website for others to see. I'm trying to build a wait time monitoring site which would eventually use the data to revive something like the old whentoride.com (which went down in like 2009). Once I have a nice dataset of ride wait time information I can start to build models of the rides and their attendance.