Not to be confused with the "Cycle Monorail" ride, which was renamed "Mini Helicopters" in RCT2.

The Monorail Cycles are a Gentle Ride featured in RCT1's Corkscrew Follies expansion and all future installments. In RCT2, they count as Gentle Rides for research, but will be listed in both the Transport Rides and Gentle Rides tab. OpenRCT2 changes this, so they only appear in the Gentle Rides tab.

(The two Cycle Monorail rides in Sprightly Park)

“Special bicycles run on a steel monorail track, propelled by the pedalling of the riders.” - In-game description

Pre-Built Designs

Technical Information

Stats

• Base Excitement Rating: 1.40
• Base Intensity Rating: 0.20
• Base Nausea Rating: 0.00

Stat Requirements

• Length of at least 459ft (140m)

If this is failed, all three stats will be divided by 2.

Stat Contribution Values

• Excitement Rating Value Multiplier: 50
• Intensity Rating Value Multiplier: 10
• Nausea Rating Value Multiplier: 10
• Soft Guest Cap Contribution: 45

Building Information

• Cost of Station Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $15.00
• Cost of Straight Track Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $10.00
• Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $2.50*
• Support Height Limit (ft/m/height units): 20ft/6m/+4

*Vanilla RCT2 does not decimal points in its support costs. Instead it will round down or round up to the next whole dollar amount at certain height intervals to equalize the amount as if it were spending a decimal amount. In OpenRCT2, it will correctly spend the decimal amount every time.

Other Information

• Maximum Guests Per Car: 1
• Maximum Number of Cars: Depends on track length - Upper limit of 12 in RCT1, 31 in Vanilla RCT2, and 255 in OpenRCT2.
• Sheltered?: No

Building the Monorail Cycles

Like the other tracked Gentle Rides, the Monorail Cycles are very straight-forward with no crazy track pieces or characteristics to keep track of. They are not as compact as something like the Car Ride or Mini Helicopters due to the fact that they don't have the tiny one-tile turns. Instead, the only turn sizes available to the Monorail Cycles are the small two-tile long turns and the medium three-tile long turns. It is also the only tracked Gentle Ride to feature s-bends.

The ride, in fact, only has five different track pieces: station, straight piece, small turn, medium turn, and s-bend. This makes the Monorail Cycles extremely easy to pick up and build, but also very limiting.

One very glaring omission on the Monorail Cycles is that you can't go up or downhill with it, meaning that whatever level of elevation you start building the ride is where it's going to be for the entirety of the track. If you run into land that the ride can't navigate, your only options are to either reroute the ride to avoid that piece of land, or terraform the land so that the track can cross it. 

The Monorail Cycles also ties four other rides in the game (Circus, Magic Carpet, 3D Cinema, and Swinging Inverter Ship) for having the lowest support limit of any ride in the game at only four tiles off the ground. This low support limit combined with the inability for it to go up or down on the track makes it extremely awkward to build since the ride has difficulty going around the existing park and difficulty going over it as well. If you were to build one of these, you would need to preplan a location for it ahead of time and avoid building anything else in that area until you build the ride there.

The Monorail Cycles only has a single vehicle option, which are human-powered bicycles. They have a top speed of only 2mph (3km/h), which is the same speed as the helicopters on the Mini Helicopters, however the bicycles are single-seated and aren't sheltered from the rain. Due to their human-powered nature, the bicycles cannot operate without a guest in them. This is further reflected by the fact that the ride doesn't have a test function, meaning that the ride stats will only be calculated once a guest has gotten on the ride and completed it.

Just like all the other human-powered vehicles in the game, all guests will pedal at the same exact speed regardless of their Energy level, and the pedalling of the rides does not cause them to lose Energy faster.

In spite of its severe disadvantages over the other tracked Gentle Rides, the Monorail Cycles does have a small advantage of having the cheapest track pieces of any Gentle Ride in the game with the cost of a station piece being $15.00 and the cost of a straight track piece being $10.00, which is $3.00/$3.70 and $2.00/$2.50 (Vanilla RCT2/OpenRCT2) cheaper respectively than the Car Ride, Mini Helicopters, or Monster Trucks. It also has the lowest length requirement of any ride in the game (not counting rides without a length requirement) of only 140m, which is 20m less than the Mini Helicopters, and 60m less than the Car Ride.

Stats

The stats of the Monorail Cycles are worse than its brethren rides. It has the second-lowest base Excitement of 1.40, which only beats the Maze. It keeps all of the same stat bonuses and stat bonus values as the Car Ride or Mini Helicopters, including inexplicably the BonusDrops value in spite of having no inclined track pieces. This implies that the Monorail Cycles were intended to have inclined track pieces at some point in development, or more likely, that these values were simply copy-pasted from the Mini Helicopters.

Just like the Mini Helicopters, the BonusTrainLength exploit that works on the Car Ride does not work on the Monorail Cycles. No matter how long you wait for, the ratings will never get calculated. The exploit is also not as practical on the Monorail Cycles due to the fact that every vehicle needs to be full before the train can start moving.

Because the Monorail Cycles has a lower base Excitement and equivalent values for all of the stat modifiers, its Excitement Rating will always be smaller than an equivalent design on the Car Ride or Mini Helicopters (assuming it meets the length requirement for those rides). Due to the fact that the track cannot have drops, the BonusDrops value will never get used, and as it cannot move any faster than 2mph, the BonusMaxSpeed and BonusAverageSpeed contributions will also be lower.

Just like the other tracked Gentle Rides, the Intensity and Nausea Ratings and bonus values that contribute to these ratings mean practically nothing. The 0.01 Nausea on the ride comes from the BonusMaxSpeed value for Nausea being high enough to give it a hundredth of a point despite the snails pace that ride runs at.

Throughput and Profit

The Monorail Cycles has the worst throughput of any tracked ride in the game; even the Mini Golf usually operates faster than any Monorail Cycles ride. To demonstrate this point, let's look at the Squeaky Cycles pre-built.

The Mini Helicopters, which already compares unfavorably to the Car Ride, runs at the same speed as the bicycles whilst being both two-seater vehicles and having rain protection meaning that it will process twice as many guests and will continue to do so during a rainstorm.

Due to both its incredibly low speed, and its low number of vehicles at only 4, the Squeaky Cycles customers per hour will fluctuate between 96 and 144 guests per hour, which averages at 120 guests per hour.

The Monorail Cycles has a lower Excitement value multiplier than either of its brethren, which compounded with its lower average Excitement rating, results in a lower maximum ticket price. At 5-13 months old, the Squeaky Cycles has a maximum ticket price of $2.60. After factoring in its operating cost of $89.60 per hour, this results in a final profit of $222.40 per hour. Factor in the fact that a mechanic will need to fix the ride, and that the ride will experience downtime when it breaks down (and if it rains if you don't cover the ride), and the Monorail Cycles will make so little money that you won't notice the profit it makes. In Vanilla RCT2, this price is $4.20 instead, which is a bit better, but still results in a final profit of just over $400.00 per hour, which most flat rides can beat.

Because of its slow speed and small guest capacity, it's also very prone to causing guests waiting in the queue to become unhappy with the long queueing times, much worse than the Mini Helicopters did, which already had the problem worse than the Car Ride.

Verdict

The Monorail Cycles is one of the worst rides in the game. It is essentially a worse version of the Mini Helicopters, which itself is a worse version of the Car Ride. It's awkward and annoying to build due to its small support limit and inability to incline the track, and its slow throughput and low ticket price will result in guests complaining about the queueing times and the ride making less money than most flat rides.

Only build the ride if you're building it purely for aesthetics and have the empty space and money to throw around. With some decorations, it can become a pretty ride.

Other Gentle Rides

[to come soon]