Why does riding a roller coaster feel so much faster than driving in a car at a similar speed?
In: Physics
Your body can feel changes in speed and changes in direction. Ask your mommy or daddy to speed up really fast, slow down really fast, or turn the car really fast. You will feel it like a roller coaster. However, doing these things on a road tends to be dangerous because you can crash.
Rollercoasters change speed and direction more quickly than a car because it is safe to do on a track. Your body feels those changes.
Your body cannot feel unchanging speed, though your body can feel wind from speed. The faster you go the more wind there is. In a normal car, the windshield stops the wind from hitting you, so you don’t feel it.
In a roller coaster, there is usually no windshield to block the wind so you feel the wind and feel the speed.
The reason you can only feel changes in speed and not speed itself is because once everything in your body gets moving at the same speed, nothing in your body is pushing it pulling against itself and there’s nothing to feel (other than the wind.) If you have flown in an airplane and drank water, you will notice the water stays normal in a cup even though you are moving very fast. But if you hold that cup of water when the plane is speeding up for takeoff or slowing down for landing, the water will splash around. Your body can also feel it’s own liquid and soft stuff splashing as you speed up or slow down.
Frames of reference. Speed doesn’t matter because you brain does not have a sense of the speed of the vehicle you travel in at all.
Planes go a lot faster than cars but when you’re looking out of the window at 30,000 feet the slowly moving landscape doesn’t give your brain any indication that you are traveling 300 miles an hour.
Roller coasters never have you much farther than a few feet away from other parts of the track or eye catching set dressing that zip in and out of your field of vision, constantly giving your brain data that it can actually interpret as “fuckin whoa! we must be moving!”
Most cars are enclosed so you don’t have a 60+ MPH wind blasting you in the face. Roller coasters don’t.
Cars tend to drive on straightaways and gradual curves. Roller coasters are designed to maximize sudden turns/dips/climbs
Roller coasters are designed with much steeper hills and tighter curves than a road. This causes it to feel more “jerky” and out of control even at more moderate speeds.
That said, some coasters do in fact reach or exceed vehicle speeds. The record is approximately 150 MPH. There are at least 5 coasters that launch forward reaching over 100 MPH in under 5 seconds.
It’s because when you drive a car, the slope of the plane (road) you’re on tends to be stable, linear, flat, etc. Our body reacts more depending on speed and change of direction. On a roller coaster, you’re going up high really fast and down really fast too. Direction constantly changes in a coaster, hence it feels faster.
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