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But the funniest thing is, strictly speaking, it isn’t even making the queue for the ticket holder that much shorter. While you have to waste time going to the attraction and getting a ticket, the time you would normally spend in the queue is now yours to spend how you like. Often, though, because of the time on the ticket, you will end up wandering around, buying food you wouldn’t otherwise have bought, browsing through shops you would normally not visit, and ride rides with short queues that you probably wouldn’t care about otherwise.

Also, having to plan your day around timed tickets, especially in a park like Disney where so many rides have Fast Pass, becomes tiresome. Frankly, it sucks the fun out of the day to have to ‘schedule’ it around when you’re due to return to a ride. You have to plan lunch, when to get more tickets and when to use current tickets around what the time is on that slip of paper you get.

I suppose the old adage is “well, you don’t have to use this system – there’s still a stand by queue”. Well, no, it isn’t as simple as that. Thing is, if it wasn’t for Fastrack, Fast Pass or Q-Bot, the stand by queue would probably be a third of the length it actually is.

Look no further than Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean. A high capacity ride that never had queues. Fast Pass was installed, a stand by queue suddenly and mysteriously appeared as people were getting Fast Pass to avoid that queue.

Another incentive is the much-maligned single rider queue. The single rider queue, or SRQ, is a separate queue line for loners who in theory get fast-track entry by filling in empty seats left by odd-numbered groups.

Single riders may think they’re doing the noble thing by adding ballast to seats that would otherwise be empty, and observant guests in the stand by queue may applaud the park for the lack of empty seats on the train, but unless organised with military precision, the benefits of the SRQ are overrated.

Just about the only parks where SRQ works is Disney, where rides have batchers who can establish how many single riders are required to fill a ride.

Without batching, burdening operators with yet another queue (on top of Fastrack and the stand by queue) eats away at the capacity of even the most efficient coaster. Delaying the train for even a few seconds while a single rider finds their empty seat is a complete nonsense when the whole train could in that time have been dispatched to avoid stacking.

At Disney, it is the norm for single riders to use a special queue that joins on the loading side of the ride so that they can be grouped up with odd numbered groups before it is likely to cause delay.

But, even so, filling up the occasional empty seat is little more than a PR exercise. The only beneficiaries are the single riders themselves who normally can get on a coaster within fifteen minutes.

While even this isn’t guaranteed, taking a handful of riders out of the stand by queue of 1200 people (an hours worth, for example) and putting them in the single rider queue saves just 30-seconds out of every hour.

And that’s on paper. This doesn’t account for the fact that single riders distract operators and would cost the ride more than 30-seconds over the hour. It also doesn’t account for the fact that while most people in the stand by queue would only ride once, single riders often reride over and over again, which means that it isn’t in fact 10 people out of the stand by queue, it is less because they wouldn’t be there anyway. Continues...