If you’re too dumb to not re-buckle a seatbelt after it comes undone on a coaster, then you shouldn’t be riding coasters. Simple as that.
This isn't the issue at all.
Parks volunteer to engage in this seatbelt safety theater bullshit—they implicitly communicate to guests that these completely unnecessary seatbelts are a necessary safety feature of these rides—when, in the VAST majority of cases, they're nothing more than a measuring tool or, worse, a pacifier to satiate uninformed lawyers/insurance companies.
When guests are fed this nonsense by the parks, it is completely reasonable for them to freak the fuck out when what they believe to be a safety feature of the ride comes undone mid-cycle. It's easy for us not to sympatheize with the fear as we all instinctually know seatbelts on coasters are almost universally stupid and useless. If we work to put ourselves into the shoes of riders who don't have that deep knowledge of the industry though, hopefully it's not hard to see why people would react in such extreme or seemingly irrational ways.
These coasters SHOULD NOT have seatbelts. All they do is slow operations, make rides less comfortable, and add a frequent point of confusion for guests that, very often, results in horrible bouts of bad press for not only the parks stupid enough to add them, but for the industry as a whole.
The amusement industry is insanely safe, but when parks add fake, useless, failure-prone seatbelts to rides that frequently unlatch, are not fully latched upon dispatch, can be unlatched mid-ride by bad actors, or whatever else, it creates a perception that the industry is far less safety-conscious than it actually is.
So yeah, fuck parks that bolt unnecessary seatbelts to rides and the parks that do so deserve all the bad press they receive from incidents like this. Just a shame the reputation of the rest of the industry also gets scarred in the process.
wesh.com
