Detachable vs Fixed Grip Lifts

[snoloco]

The videos are helpful, thank you for posting them.

The ride time for the Express is around 4 minutes and the Summit is 7. That’s quite a difference.

It seems if the goal is to move more people out of the base area the Summit is the winner. If you want quicker laps the win goes to the Express.

Diminishing returns for a shorter lift, but the difference is always significant. For longer lifts, you're looking at a 5-8 minute difference in ride time, depending on the speeds they are running.

If you pulled scan data from both lifts on a busy day, with them running at the same speeds as in the videos, you would likely find that the fixed grip has higher ridership. This may come as surprising, as the detachable would be the far more popular lift. However, a lift's ridership is very much determined by its capacity, and how well it is operated. Note that the capacities could just as easily be the other way around.

When we stopped there this year on the way home from our Jay Indy trip it was a very busy day with 5-6" pow overnight and races going on. There were significant lines for the Express and the Summit was only a few chairs deep and and net time much faster. I found it very interesting that people would rather wait in line for the high speed than do a little hoofing around to the shorter lines...

The problem is that the detachable doesn't have enough capacity for the demand. With the low capacity, the line for the detachable will move very slowly. What might be a 2-3 minute wait at a lift with tighter chair spacing, would likely be a 5-6 minute wait in this case, and thus over the threshold to where the fixed grip with no line saves you time. While the detachable is significantly faster, if it doesn't have enough capacity to keep the line below 3 minutes, which is the difference in ride time, then it doesn't save you any time over the fixed grip.

Although I'd love every lift to be full speed all the time, I find that the close chair spacing / slower speed model is ultimately better. This is because many lifts designed with wider chair spacing still aren't running at full speed, and at abysmal throughput. With tighter chair spacing, a decent capacity can still be maintained at a slower speed.