Lift Throughput: Why it Matters and How to Improve it

Chatted with the dude who drove the big rig a few different times.
He’d sleep in it and get some laps in before he picked up his trailer and hit the road again.
Interstate 81 exit is just a couple miles away if that.
Skiing on snow beats driving through it.
Where was he from?
 
In regards to not filling chairs, where I ski most they have 3 to 4 queue lines with one for singles and they have a person telling people when to go to the loading area and they will fill the chair unless for example on the triple there are two people in line and there are no singles in line
This. Some signage and some staffing make a huge difference. I also don't mind letting, say, three newish snowboarders go on a quad since packing them in is likely to stop the lift.

I once watched a family for four heading to a quad and the father just let the other three go so he could spread his legs out superwide on the next chair solo. Line was very long. What a d****.

I'll add something not quite on topic for this thread but related - if a long line is disorganized with people cutting, it's twice as bad. One thing to wait 15 minutes for a lift chilling and thinking or talking with friends. It's quite another to have to spend those 15 minutes fighting to not get cut so it doesn't turn into 20 minutes or more. I don't need that stress.
 
According to management, the adjustments Killington made to the Ramshead Express queue have significantly improved the throughput. All they did was move the RFID gate to the end. It used to be placed just before you loaded. People would get stuck in the gate and it would mess up the grouping and cause seats or even entire chairs to go up empty. This change was so successful that they are now looking at how to implement it at other lifts.
 
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