lapbar.

About Lapbar

Los Angeles, California

Lapbar is a place to keep track of the roller coasters you have ridden, and to say what they were actually like.

Why it exists

Enthusiasts already keep this record. It lives in spreadsheets, in notes apps, in the back of a notebook, in memory. What none of those do is answer the questions people actually ask each other in a queue: is it still rough? how long is the wait, really? is it worth the walk to the back of the park?

Those answers cannot be scraped from anywhere, because nobody publishes them. They only exist if riders write them down. That is what Lapbar collects — dated laps, from real visits, by people who were there.

What we will not do

• No scraped catalogs. Every coaster in Lapbar comes from a freely licensed source or from a park's own website, and every photograph carries its photographer and licence.
• No invented numbers. Where a stat is unknown, Lapbar says it is unknown rather than showing a zero. An unrecorded inversion count is not the same as a ride with no inversions.
• No tracking. There is no advertising SDK in the app and no third party following you around. If that ever changes, it will be said plainly here first.

Who makes it

Lapbar is built in Los Angeles by Patrick Darmody. It is a small independent project rather than a company with a marketing department — which means the person reading [email protected] is the person who built the thing you are writing about.

The catalog is not finished

It never will be, and that is by design. Coasters open, close, get retracked and get renamed. If something is missing or wrong, there is a Tell us link on every coaster page, and suggestions go to a person rather than a queue.