About Parks Radar

Parks Radar helps families and theme-park fans pick the right day to visit. We forecast how busy the biggest amusement parks in the United States are likely to be on any given date, show each park's operating calendar and closures, and surface live ride wait times, so you can plan around the busiest days instead of getting stuck in them.

The idea is simple. A great park day and a miserable one are often separated by nothing more than the date you happened to choose. A Saturday during a holiday week can have triple the crowd of a Tuesday two weeks later, with the same tickets and the same rides. Parks Radar exists to make that difference visible before you book.

What the site does

• Crowd calendar: a color-coded, day-by-day forecast of how busy each park is expected to be, so you can spot the calm days at a glance.
• Official park schedules: daily operating hours and closed dates, pulled from each park's published calendar, so you never plan a trip around a day the park is shut.
• Rides and waits: every ride shown as a flip card — the front has the live wait and a graph of the ride's usual wait by hour with the live wait marked on it; flip it for minimum height, intensity, restraint type, body fit, pregnancy guidance, and a general sensory note.
• Park map: toggle layers (rides, dining, water, restrooms, first aid, nursing, baby care, lockers and more) to drop color-coded pins.
• Trip planner: enter a travel window and we rank the calmest days inside it.
• Compare: see which park is quietest on a given date when you have more than one option.

Reading a ride card

On the Rides & Waits page each ride is a card. The front shows the live wait now and a small graph of the ride's usual wait by hour for today, with the current wait marked as a dot: above the line means the ride is slower than usual right now, below the line means it is moving faster than usual. Tap or click the card to flip it for the details:

• Minimum height — the official height requirement in inches, where the park publishes one.
• Intensity — our opinion-based gauge from Gentle to Extreme, to help families judge a ride at a glance.
• Restraint — lap bar, over-the-shoulder harness, and whether a test seat sits at the entrance.
• Body fit (larger riders) — Tight means snug restraints where larger or taller guests may not fit comfortably (try the test seat first); Normal fits most guests; Roomy is generous seating.
• Pregnancy — whether the ride falls under standard "not recommended for expectant guests" advisories.
• Sensory (general guide) — a plain-language cue such as spinning, sudden drops, water, or dark/low-light sections, derived from the ride type. This is a general guide to help families plan, not a certified medical or epilepsy/strobe rating — always confirm specifics (and quiet-room availability) with the park.

Where the graphs come from

The usual-wait graph on each ride card is served from our own database. A background collector records public wait times on a schedule and rolls them up into a precomputed chart for each ride, so the page loads the graphs from a single request rather than recalculating them in your browser. Because the history builds over time, a ride's curve starts sparse and fills in as more days of data are collected; until then we fall back to a forecast estimate.

Who runs Parks Radar

Parks Radar is operated by September Fair LLC, an independent publisher. We are not a travel agency, a ticket reseller, or part of any park or resort company. Nobody at a park pays us to make their numbers look better or worse, and we have no incentive to push you toward one destination over another. Our only goal is to be the planning tool we wished existed when booking our own trips.

How the forecasts are built

Our crowd levels are model estimates. They combine the patterns that reliably drive theme-park attendance, including the day of the week, school and public holidays, seasonality, and each park's own published operating calendar, into a single easy-to-read level for each day. Where a park publishes its own attendance-related forecasts or special-event schedule, we factor that in too.

Live ride wait times come from public wait-time data, and our planning averages are built from the way waits typically rise and fall across the day and the year, so you can gauge a normal Tuesday afternoon versus a packed Saturday morning.

How we keep the data honest

Two principles guide the data on this site. First, live before curated: wherever a park publishes hours, closures, or events to a source we can read, the site shows that live and updates itself, rather than relying on a number we typed in months ago. Second, official before third-party: height requirements and special-event dates are checked against each park's own website, not copied from aggregators. When something cannot be confirmed from an official source, we would rather leave it out or label it as an estimate than present a guess as fact.

Even so, forecasts are forecasts and schedules change. Crowd levels, hours, and wait times on Parks Radar are estimates and are not official or guaranteed. Always confirm hours, dates, and ride requirements on the official park website before you book or travel.

Open data we use, and its licences

Much of what you see on a park page comes from open datasets, and we credit them here as their licences ask. Where a licence asks for it, the park page also names the source beside the data.

• OpenStreetMap contributors (Open Database License): park outlines, amenities, opening hours and nearby places.
• GeoNames (CC BY 4.0): the nearest town or city for a park, worked out from its coordinates.
• Natural Earth (public domain): a park's country and state or province, worked out from its coordinates.
• Overture Maps Foundation: nearby places and street addresses, under the licences Overture publishes for each dataset.
• Wikidata (CC0), Wikipedia and Wikivoyage (text under CC BY-SA 4.0): park facts, history and travel tips. Photos from Wikimedia Commons carry their own licence and author beside them.
• US National Park Service and Recreation.gov (US government works): descriptions, alerts, facilities and visitor counts for federal parks.
• NOAA / US National Weather Service (public domain) and MET Norway (CC BY 4.0): forecasts and climate normals.
• Queue-Times.com: live ride wait times. Open Charge Map contributors (CC BY 4.0): EV charging near parks.

A note on independence and ads

Parks Radar is free to use. To keep it that way, the site shows advertising and some outbound links (such as ticket and hotel buttons) are affiliate links, which may earn us a small commission at no extra cost to you. This never changes the crowd forecast for a date or which day we tell you is calmest. You can read more in our Privacy Policy.

Get in touch

Spotted something that looks wrong, or want to work with us? We genuinely want to hear about data that looks off so we can fix it. Reach us any time on our Contact page.

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