The fix is rarely to make it smaller
THE RUB
“Screams - bloodcurdling screams,” is how one local resident described the noise coming from Universal Studios Hollywood’s newest roller coaster - Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift - according to Times’ reporting from Toluca Lake, California.
Universal embarked on an audacious project. Faced with declining traffic in the competitive amusement park industry, they invested heavily in the thrilling new ride.
They have a significant space constraint. Their park houses an active studio that requires “quiet on the set” environments, and they are land-locked by neighborhoods that expect peace and little to no noise.
Roller coasters are noisy. So Universal spent three years and an estimated $200 million plus to build an exciting new attraction that was whisper quiet. They succeeded! In test runs, the 72 mph looping, spinning coaster barely makes a peep. But the riders, they’re expressing their enthusiasm loudly.
THE FRAMEWORK
Part of the joy of riding a roller coaster is screaming frantically. Universal gets that, and they factored that into their design.
I’m fascinated by the design details engineers took to reduce the impact of screams on their surrounding neighbors. The coaster has “scream screens,” which are half-pipe glass shields meant to bubble wrap the sound. They also built a 940-foot sound wall made of a sound-absorbing rubber. Here's the element I like the best: the spinning cars on the coaster, are programmed to turn the rider's mouths away from nearby homes at peak-screaming moments.
Unfortunately, those steps weren’t enough. Neighbors complain that screams happen every 30 seconds for 10 hours. They can hear them with their windows closed, and one woman said she can hear them without her hearing aids.
The park is responding. They are expanding the sound wall and will stop running the coaster at 7 pm until Halloween Horror Nights, then they’ll stop at 10 pm.
THE PRACTICE
I get the neighbors’ complaints. I wouldn’t want screams leaking into my living room either. But I’m rooting for Universal.
The screams are the proof that it’s working. Universal didn’t stumble into this problem. They need excitement to drive traffic. They solved what they could in advance. They took the constraint seriously and still got surprised.
That’s how it usually goes with big goals. You can pre-solve for the friction you can see - the mechanical noise, the vibration, the physics - and still get blindsided by the resistance you can’t model. In this case, it was thousands of riders having the best ten seconds of their day at full volume.
Universal’s answer isn’t to give up on the ride. It’s to keep adjusting the wall. Leonard Garner had lived next to that noise for weeks before Universal invited him to ride the coaster. He’s 73. Afterward, a reporter asked if he screamed.
“Hell, yeah!”
When building something audacious and unplanned resistance shows up, the fix is rarely to make it smaller. It’s to keep adjusting. Whether the wall and the neighbors ever find peace is an open question, but I know who I’m pulling for.