How are rollercoster saftey standards created and tested for multiple rides holding hundreds/thousands of people a day? How are you able to put so much trust in this sort of engineering?
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Specifically for the multiple rides part of this question, there is something called ‘fatigue loads’ which takes into account multiple repeated loads. Materials and structures have been studied for years and years and ways have been found of predicting how strong the structure needs to be to withstand not just one load, but thousands and thousands of that same load. Structures and the materials they are made of can be put under many many repeated loads in a lab, putting the structure under as many individual load cycles as the rollercoaster or any other structure might experience during its life in a short period of time. After enough repeated experiments, which reliably match the predictive models, we can trust those models to reliably predict the max fatigue load for a new structure.
There are also ways of predicting how quickly a crack will grow, and how much a crack reduces the strength of the structure. Often the first signs of wear that could eventually lead to failure will be cracks that grow slowly over time, and if the structure is designed very well those cracks will be visible to inspectors well before they become dangerous. Basically, if you a small crack, it concentrates the load that would normally be spread over a large area onto a much smaller area, and leads to the crack growing. Structures like rollercoasters are sometimes inspected regularly, and if a crack is found it can be stopped from growing by drilling a hole at the end of the crack which redistributes the load and prevents the crack from growing further.
There are still failures sometimes, often due to someone making a mistake that incorrectly accounted for fatigue loads or stress concentrations, or because an operator cut corners by skipping inspections or ignoring signs of wear.
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