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Comment by euske | Hacker News Reader

In Japan, there were a couple of ski lifts that make almost 90-degree turn, called "bending lift (屈曲リフト)". Near the turning point they put up a warning sign like "please hold tight or you might be thrown off". As a kid I always enjoyed the experience though. Sadly all of them have been torn down by about a decade ago, due to its high maintenance cost.

cf. http://cable.cocolog-nifty.com/sakudo/2006/02/post_d5e1.html

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You know, it really baffles me how these things can operate safely with the general population. No way for the operator to keep track of the whole thing and thus no way to stop in an emergency, countless ways to injure yourself or others, yet there seems to be hardly any regulation for them (given the laughably sorry state some of them are in) and apparently not that many injuries either.

Compare that to most household products with a thousand warning labels for things that are common sense and/or completely harmless. Like do idiots not go skiing or something?

There’s a lot of ways to die or become severely injured while skiing. I imagine that alone weeds out people who need warning labels on blenders.

You could say the exact same thing about elevators. There's a lot of regulation, inspection and safety features that isn't well known about these lifts. But it does exist and the safety record is impressive. The drive to the hill is a much higher risk.

> keep track of the whole thing

Do you really expect a human to usefully monitor the whole thing continuously? If you look at a modern lift, there is quite an array of sensors on each tower.

> no way to stop in an emergency

There's an emergency stop button at both ends. They get used on a regular basis due to emergencies. By far the most common emergency is someone falling in the loading or unloading area. (I think a lot of high capacity lifts actually have multiple emergency stop buttons at each end so that any of several operators can stop the lifts.)

I guess skiing comes with a high acceptance of risk to begin with.

There’s a reason everyone signs a waiver before they give you the pass.

Never signed anything and have been on some rustbuckets of anchor-style ski lifts. The full seat ones are usually better maintained, but imo an anchor to the face shoulld be pretty nasty.

The liability waiver is printed on the back of the lift ticket, and you accept it by virtue of using the ticket.

(I don’t know about the legalities of that as a contract, but it’s how it’s almost always done at ski resorts.)

I have never encountered this in Europe. Or i might be misunderstanding what you mean

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