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Park Acre-age


fryler87
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I think the figure (364 acres) includes the parking lot and any land the park is developed on. The park has about 725 acres of land that they own. I believe this also includes the Kings Island camp ground, which the park owns and operates. However, PKI no longer owns the Kings Island Resort & Conference Center.

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Good question. Sounds like someone should call up Jeff to see. I would image that since the actual acerage is around 760, that the 300 and some odd developed would include the parking lot, but not the campground. At least, they should be direct with the guest by saying the actual acerage of the theme park itself (including the backstage areas). The parking lot is huge, about a mile long. I forget the actual size of the camp ground, and as CoasterRZ said already, the conference center is not owned by PKI.

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I heard that a lot of their acreage is part of a land reserve and is not allowed to be constructed on. If that makes sense.

Bull. They expand and add new stuff every year. If this was true, then they wouldn't be able to keep adding things like SOB in undeveloped areas of the park. That might have been correct when the Animal Safari was around, but not now. What park in their right mind, would not want the possibility to develop all the land that they own? Not one that I can think of.

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Not that PKI will ever expand to that land, but the land back there is very hilly and would make installing midways next to impossible.

There is nothing impossible with today's technology. You can bulldoze anything and flatten it out, or better yet, build it up like some big wooden pier, and add some water features nearby. Anything is possible, and I am sure PKI can make hilly or flat land work out the way they want.

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It's interesting that people say building on hilly terrain is next to impossible. That is simply not true. Look at Universal Studios Hollywood - they have a huge escalator system that takes about 15 minutes to navigate separating the two major sections of the theme park. Also, San Diego Zoo and many other zoos are on varying terrain.

That is not an obstacle.

In regards to it being a nature reserve, I don't believe any of the land actually owned by Paramount Parks is in the nature reserve. I recently read an article, I believe from a paper in Cincinnati, where an official stated they still have about 400 acres to develop. He wouldn't have stated the they could develop there if it was a reserve. The official's name escapes me.

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The parking lot is huge, about a mile long.

I've heard a few times that the parking lot is 100 acres. If I remember correctly, I picked that up from a talkative elevator operator several years ago on the way up to the top of the tower...

At any rate, PKI it was fortunate Taft had enough foresight to buy enough land at the beginning to allow for decades of future expansion. According to Chef's book, we can all thank Roy Disney for that!

Joel

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No I`ve never been to Kennywood. I didn`t say that building on hilly land was impossible, but almost impossible. The big reason it would be almost impossible is cost. True, you can fill in some of the valleys but that is costly.

I heard the nature preserve from I believe Shaggy. Where is he when you need him? I know that the Little Miami River is a state and National Scenic river, so I don`t know if that has anything to do with the nature preserve. Jeffrey Siebert said that they have about 400 acres left to develop. Lets home that 2005 attraction expands into some of that undeveloped land. Actually the park originally owned 16000 acres, including the Kings Island Resort & Conference Center, as well as the Kings Island Golf Course and the Tennis courtsw across I-71 from the park.

I don`t know how big the parking lot is in terms of size, but it contains approximately 11,000 parking spaces in it.

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So I did a few calculations. If you figger that the average parking space is about 15 ft by 25 feet, with 11,000 spaces, the parking lot is about 4,125,000 sq. ft. This amounts to about 95 acres. Quite a large amount of space, if you ask me.

Again, I don't know the dimensions of a parking space, so the size of the lot may in fact be a bit smaller.

Edited by fryler87
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OK, I'll again admit I don't know exactly how big a parking space is, but 8x10 ft seems a little small to me. A GMC Yukon Denali XL will fit in a standard parking space (though it'd be a tight squeeze.) According to www.consumerguide.com, this monster is 219 inches long (a little over 18 feet) and 79 inches wide (about 6.5 ft.) If one needs about 2 feet feet (about 1-1.5 feet to the line) to open the door, then the space would have to be at least 18 feet long and at least 10 feet wide. So I was off.

New calculations...with 11,000 spaces and each space being 10x18 ft, the area that could acutally park cars is almost 2 million square feet. The thing is, you have to have extra space between rows of cars so you can drive your car up and down the lot and get to a parking space. This COULD make that figure 1.5 times larger. I'll guess that the parking lot is about 50 to 65 acres.

Edited by fryler87
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OK, I'll again admit I don't know exactly how big a parking space is, but 8x10 ft seems a little small to me. A GMC Yukon Denali XL will fit in a standard parking space (though it'd be a tight squeeze.) According to www.consumerguide.com, this monster is 219 inches long (a little over 18 feet) and 79 inches wide (about 6.5 ft.) If one needs about 2 feet feet (about 1-1.5 feet to the line) to open the door, then the space would have to be at least 18 feet long and at least 10 feet wide. So I was off.

Thats a little better. The usual parking size I can find digging through the net is 8.5 feet wide by 18 feet long. I am thinking that the aisles between the vehicles are probably right at 17-18 feet wide, so leave an entire row of spaces out, every other row, and you should get a rough estimate of the size of the lot.

Edited by fyrfyter
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I also did some calculations using 8.5 feet by 18 feet as my parking size. This calculates out to be just under 40 acres in just regular parking spaces. This does not include isleways, bus parking, or handycap parking. These spots tend to be a little larger, more so in the case of the bus.

I checked on the average lane size and came up with 12 feet, but Im not to sure the lanes are 24 feet wide at PKI so my best guess is 20 feet. I would have to say the parking lot at PKI is close to 100 acres. Plus, I think I have heard that somwhere anyway.

If someone ever gets the chance, start at one end of the parking lot, reset your odometer, then drive, in a straight line, to the other side of the lot. Turn 90 degrees, and repeat. This is the only real way of coming up with a accurate number. There are just too many factors in deteriming the size of the lot.

Edited by Bradb055
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Even if you thought my last answer sounded good, this one is much beter and more accurate. It's time to settle this little squable ( I may have made that word up).

Ok, if you look at the arial photo (click here)you will notice a scale at the bottom of the picture. Using this scale I calcuated the approximate square mileage of the parking lot. Then, I used a conversion calcuator (click here) to find the acrage. I came up with about 105 acres. This is just a rough estimate, and can change from person to person due to inaccuracies in measuring.

That should settle it! cool.gif

Edited by Bradb055
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I totally forgot about TerraServer. Well thats my duh for the day. I have used it so many other times in these posts to prove my point and reference open areas of land between rides. I can't believe I didn't think of that at all. Good Job on figuring that one out.

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