Work as a trainer in the traffic logistics department of a massive amusement park serving anywhere from a few 1000 to 10,000+ guests a day. Our departments primary function was to manage resources to effectively engineer safe, smooth flows of guests coming in and out of the property at large end of the park main entrance. This made our work significantly more complicated than the routine operations in most other departments. 

There was a reason our department needed to work closely with city police officers rather than park security guards: guests in bumper cars is fun and games; guests in SUVs while on their phones in parking, lots filled with families who have just gotten out of their own vehicles—not so much. When you’re operating a roller coaster on a track, guests can see how many seats are available, fill them up, and you just have to check their restraints. In contrast, trams don’t operate with the push of a button, but rely entirely on driver competency. They are not on a track but rely entirely on teammates at ground level coordinating pedestrian traffic flow to ensure overcrowded benches and lapsitting won’t lead to someone falling off your vehicle as you take a corner or that misdirected crowd flows won’t lead to you trying to drive a Class-C, 3-car commercial vehicle next to people pushing strollers where they were never meant to have been. There were platforms retrofitted to the backs of each tram installed on them so that each tram in operation could have a teammate filling a position known as named spieler could monitor the entire periphery of the vehicle and everyone on board before during an after movement. Spielers were never really just there to shpiel: advising guests regarding the names they could use to find their specific parking location when trying to head home 8, 10, 12 hours later. They were there to support drivers navigating complex, unpredictable systems via giant, unwieldy 6-ton machines. You see, as those spiel platforms were being installed, so too were buttons being retroactively integrated into these vehicles electrical system—the button a spieler needed to push after using their mic to caution guests waiting at tram stops to remain behind white lines painted on the ground to keep them safely out of the departing vehicle’s path and, hopefully, dissuade them from trying to run-and-jump onto said vehicle without the driver’s knowledge. As is often and sadly the case, all this retrofitting did not happen in response to someone anticipating risk, but rather in response to tragedy. A tram with available seats was departing a tram stop, a guest thought they could avoid waiting for the next one by way of a running leap, a driver drove, and maybe an ankle turned just the wrong way or a shoe had lost just enough tread or hand had accumulated just a bit too much slippery sunscreen in the application. These were left unknown; what was known is that the guest failed to stick their landing, fell between the second and the third car as the tram was pulling away, and did not get up again.

We all knew this story—though it had occurred before most of us were employed there—and so we all understood the true impetus of the spiel platform’s existence and the button you pushed twice to signal to the driver that it was safe to depart and once to alert them to stop absolutely a quickly as possible. Also knew that higher guest numbers increased risk exponentially because the more people there are the higher the likelihood of someone in the crowd with a higher than typical risk tolerance and the more everyone there has needed to wait in line to get in to the parking lot in line to get onto the tram in line to get into the park in line to get into every ride, gradually wearing down patience, one wait at a time. Despite all of this, our department’s 4-person management team was made aware of the plan to begin new after-hours Halloween programming. This would mean that we as a department were going to be required to get morning crowds out of the park-fed Main Entrance Tram Stop, called Main, and to Tram Stop 1, called TS-1, where they could exit our vehicles and walk to their own at precisely the same time that we would need to get whole new crowds of guests out of the parking lots-fed TS-1, onto our vehicles, and transported to the Main Entrance Tram Stop. The team decided to split our fleet: six trams dedicated exclusively to taking guests from the main entrance to TS-; six trams taking guests directly to the usually unused second half of the Main Entrance Tram Stop. 

This meant that if I was driving a tram dedicated to exiting guests— mostly families dragging half-awake children—I needed to stop long enough for everybody to climb aboard at Main. I needed to drive them to the point where I had to pause and wait behind whatever tram was loading up with incoming guests at TS-1, while hoping none of my guests got too impatient, staring at that tram stop a mere 50 feet away that they knew full well served as a gateway to the lots where their vehicles sat. Eventually, I needed to pull up, wait for those families, too disembark and for the Spieler to check that the mostly young adults in high, near-frenetic spirits at TS-1 waiting to head in for late-night Halloween reveries were standing patiently behind the white line. Alternately, if I was driving a tram dedicated to these revelers, I needed to stop long enough for everybody to climb aboard at TS-1, drive them to that secondary pavilion at Main, and then drive directly past all the waiting families at the primary pavilion, hoping they too would remain safely behind their own white line while an empty tram cruised past them en route to where they’d parked this morning.

It went exactly as well as you would imagige. Everyone—literally everyone—was frustrated, agitated, or full-on aggressive. It was a powder-keg, and every time we got through it without a fight or accident felt like the loss of another unit of our certainly finite luck. on the very first night of deployment, driving my tram up to the traffic light over the intersection that divided the park grounds from the parking grounds, I could simultaneously hear the sardined outbound passengers behind me and see the sardined inbound guests filling the standing room of TS-1 to which we were bound. Tempting though it was, I couldn’t turn around at that light. I pulled in alongside the tram stop and exercised my freedom to turn at least my own head away from the jostling, crashing crowds. Sliding my eyes over Tram Stop 2 in the distance, my brain was a match across flint. I told one of those four supervisors. Then he told his team. Then they told all of us we were doing it.

We would stop splitting the fleet. Every tram would load guests at Main, unload at TS-1, and drive to TS-2 where incoming evening guests who’d been directed straight past Lots CD&E—no matter how full or not full they were at any given hour—would be waiting after parking in Lots F-H. We’d had these geographic resources the whole time—they were for all the many 10,000-guest summertime and holiday break mornings. We’d had the gear—sandwich-style custom signage and traffic cones and fully—trained personnel to leverage them. We just didn’t have leaders who recognized how to leverage them in this new way or anyone else on our 100+ person team for whom a solution made itself visible. 

It made itself visible to me.

At our next department meeting, gearing up for another winter holiday season of slammed status, I was called down to the front to accept a gift card, a token of appreciation for offering a creative solution that had lowered the collective heart rate of my department for the rest of that October—and went on to keep it down many Octobers thereafter.