I live near Six Flags Over Georgia and used to visit occasionally. With a few exceptions, their coasters generally don’t get above 60 mph. Mindbender, for example, tops out at 50mph, but feels so ridiculously fast when you’re riding it. In a car on the highway, though, going 50 doesn’t feel like much of an event at all.
Why is this?
In: Physics
50mph sustained in a straight line doesn’t feel fast, but 0-50mph in 3 seconds feels VERY fast. 50mph around sharp turns feels VERY fast. 50mph down sharp declines feels VERY fast. 50mph through tight chicanes, around hairpins, or through mogul-like slaloms feels VERY fast. When you’re driving, my guess is that you slow down for turns and downhill sections, like a safe and lawful driver, so you’re not really experiencing anything like a roller coaster ride on the road.
As someone who drives performance automobiles and motorcycles, I can tell you that even 35mph can feel like an insane amount of speed given the right road and a car that can handle it.
Part of it is what I refer to as “the go-cart effect.”
In a go-cart, you’re out in the open inches from the ground. This makes you feel like you’re going faster than you really are.
Same effect on a roller coaster ride.
You don’t ‘feel’ velocity. You only feel acceleration.
That’s why you can be on a plane going hundreds of miles per hour but it ‘feels’ like you’re stationary.
Rollercoasters are all about accelerating and decelerating, so you feel that ‘speed’ quite a lot. In your car, you’re normally just driving in a straight line at a constant velocity so you don’t feel anything.
Perspective, Your higher up and things disappear under you a lot father away when driving. It’s just like when you look out the side of the car and things close move out of your field of view faster. The real way to experience it is try to guess how long the white dashes on the highway are and then look up how long they actually are to understand how skewed your perspective of distances are when driving.
You can have the same feeling as in rollercoaster if you are on a highway on-ramp, in a car without suspensions, without a windshield and with a big engine. This way you’ll get the same acceleration feeling and the same wind force.
A car is purposefully made to not make you feel the forces the way a rollercoaster does. It would be insanely tiring to drive any distance if rollercoaster forces were applied to you the whole way.
The forces that you feel on the ride are less about the speed of the train and more about the acceleration forces of the short trip.
Roller coasters typically don’t travel in a straight line for long, and every turn, every hill, every drop, and every twist changes the direction and speed of acceleration on your body, causing you to feel like you are going faster and faster, as well as purposefully disorienting you.
Your vision comes into play as well as others have mentioned. Skydiving feels more like you are floating because the ground is so far away even when falling at 140 m.p.h. When you look at a mountain in the distance while driving, it seems that you are hardly moving even though you are driving at 70 m.p.h. On a rollercoaster, the track and the landscape in your peripheral vision help to enhance the acceleration effects on the brain. I liked looking at the airplane while skydiving because it looked like it was going super fast as we separated.
It should be noted that many modern coasters exceed 60mph, like most (if not all) giga coaster’s and hyper coasters are over 60mph. Like Goliath at Six Flags Over Georgia is 70mph, and I believe every RMC refurbish/ground up hybrid has exceeded 60mph too. (edit: A few RMC’s are bellow 60mph, and your home park actually the slowest one)
Mindbender on the other hand probably couldn’t go much faster because it’s a Schwarzkopf looping coaster, and those things hit like 5.2g’s in their loops, so it’d probably just be very painful if it went any faster.
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