According to Go Ape’s ‘Zip Wild’ website, the prospective Moel Famau site can expect a maximum of 60 cars an hour during peak time:
The course can only accomodate a maximum of 20 participants starting every 20 minutes. Based on research carried out on Go Ape customers, we expect the average car occupancy to be over 3 people per car. So, Zip Wild will generate less than 10 car arrivals every half an hour. It will take a maximum of 3 hours to complete Zip Wild so participants will be responsible for a maximum of 60 cars during the peak hours.
As part of the development, the car park wil be improved by adding 80 extra spaces and removing the barriers, thereby reducing the cars parking on the road.
These figures are bad enough on their own – it equates to ONE CAR EVERY MINUTE on a single track road.
But bear in mind that the comings and goings are likely to be clustered around start/end times.
Also bear in mind that this will be ON TOP OF the existing traffic, which can already bring the road to a standstill at times, as we can all testify from experience of busy weekends.
But what about worst case scenarios?
Let’s assume that, for something like corporate events, everyone turns up in their own car (very possible). Using Go Ape’s figures of adding an hour’s worth of cars going up the hill to 2 hours’ worth coming down, we could, potentially, end up with up to SIXTY cars going up the hill, fighting against ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY cars coming down the hill, PLUS all the usual traffic!
That is ONE CAR EVERY TWENTY SECONDS, plus all the usual, appalling traffic!
And following on from those figures, for a car park which is already regularly full to overflowing of a weekend, what on earth wil be the good of an extra 80 parking spaces?
It looks to me as if apes can’t add up.
More worryingly, it looks like the Forestry Commission and our own local Government are also having problems adding the numbers up – or maybe they are only looking at the numbers that this will bring to their coffers.

