What makes roller coasters safe?
Coasters are designed from the the beginning with safety in mind. The average height and weight (called 95 percentile of man) are used in all calculations. From the design phase when the coaster is no more then a drawing on a paper there are things going on. The site is reviewed for soil content, wind speed, hurricane or other disaster potential and salinity if it is near the ocean. While some engineers are doing this, other are looking at metals to use in the track, weld types and support column types. On top of that other are reviewing the train features, determining what a train can weigh without riders, what the g-forces will be, what height is the smalled that is safe and what types of restraint system to use. Once all that is complete and fabrication has begin even more test are done such as complete design approval and sometime (for an extra cost) TUV approval. (think UL testing here – expensive and time consuming since it is done in Germany but mostly entails the company coming
