Rides: what is checked and what is not

Place a fairground ride or side stall from Entertainment and the event checks gain a set of ride findings. They are layout checks: they read where a ride stands, where its entrance and exit open, which phases it is on site for, what it draws, and what the council's hours allow. Not one of them judges the ride itself. A ride check that invented a number would be worse than no check, so each one carries its basis, its source and how well we were able to check it — and where the figure is ours, it says so in the finding you read.

What each ride check measures

A ride parked on the emergency route is reported by the existing Emergency route check, which now tests the built trackway as well as an indicative one — see below.

Overlap is tested. A gap between rides is not

The check asks one geometric question: do two footprints interpenetrate? It does not ask how far apart they are, because no UK source publishes a separation distance between rides. HSG175 para 182 gives only the factors to weigh — the motion and passenger clearance envelopes, emergency access and egress, segregation of the public from moving parts. Para 183 leaves coin-operated rides' spacing to vary "as long as any necessary safety envelope is not compromised". HSG195 para 491 points back at HSG175 for minimum space requirements, which the current third edition does not publish. The gov.uk open-air guide asks only that structures stand "an adequate distance apart", and the Welsh model byelaw for "gangways of adequate width". Any number we printed would be ours, so we print none.

Three things follow, and the findings say all three:

• Touching footprints are not reported. A stall row butted together, or two rides sharing a barrier line, is the normal fairground layout. Each footprint is inset by 0.05 m — our own tolerance, which exists only so that the same drawing does not flip between pass and fail on a rounding — before the two are tested, so contact is not overlap.
• Crowd barriers are not tested. A ride's own queue rail is drawn as a crowd-barrier run, and the footprint already includes the public barrier line and the entrance and exit steps. Crowd, Heras and pit runs — the ones people pass through — are left out entirely, and a remaining fence crossing is a prompt, not a verdict.
• Tree canopies are not part of this check. HSG195 para 491 does name large trees among the obstacles that matter around an amusement, so this is a real gap, and the pass says so rather than letting you read it as cover. Check canopies over a ride and its queue yourself.

A crowd zone is not tested either: a fair's rides stand inside the arena, which is what an arena is for. If you want the design held to a gap of your own, set ride_gap_m in a loaded rule pack; the finding then names it as that pack's figure, because it is not a published one.

There is no height check, and we will not invent one

The question we were asked was whether the checks cover a maximum height. They do not, and there is nothing to cover:

• No statutory planning height limit applies to a temporary ride. The permitted-development route a travelling fair relies on — the GPDO 2015, Schedule 2, Part 4, Class B — limits the land to 28 days' use in a calendar year and says nothing whatever about height. Because a fair makes no planning application, it triggers no aerodrome-safeguarding consultation either, and aerodrome safeguarding maps are held by the local planning authority: we hold no aerodrome or safeguarding dataset.
• Obstacle lighting is required by the Air Navigation Order 2016 article 222, which reaches only structures far taller than anything in this library — nothing a fair relies on requires it. Separate Civil Aviation Authority notification routes exist for tall structures and for cranes; we have not read them, so nothing here tells you whether one applies to your ride. Check with the CAA and your local aerodrome if a ride is tall or the site is near one. We quote no CAA figure anywhere, because the CAA material is cited by existence only in our source register and was never opened.
• What actually governs a ride's height is the ride's own manual, the owner of any overhead line near it, and any condition on your byelaw, your licence or the landowner's consent.

The clearance question that is real is the overhead line, and that is the check above. HSE's GS6 asks for a safety zone 6 m horizontally from the nearest wire on either side — widened on the line owner's advice, or to allow for a jib or other moving part, which is exactly what a long pendulum ride is — and asks that the risks of any work be managed within 10 m, measured at ground level from below the nearest wire. Line positions come from OpenStreetMap and may be wrong, missing or mis-tagged, so the finding is a prompt to confirm with your distribution network operator, never a measurement of the real clearance — and the pass carries that caveat too, because a line absent from OpenStreetMap or mis-tagged produces exactly the same words. Underground cables are not overhead lines and are left out. Where the line data could not be read, or came back incomplete, the finding says why instead of reporting a clear site.

Hours are the council's, and the band is guidance to councils

A funfair's hours are not ours to set and not the app's to assume — and they are only set at all where the council has acted. In England and Wales they may be set by byelaws, where your council has made them: the Public Health Act 1961 s.75(1)(a) empowers byelaws regulating a pleasure fair's hours but does not require any, and many districts have adopted none. A "pleasure fair" is a place where a charge is made for admission or for the use of the contrivances, so a free-entry fair where you pay per ride is one. In Scotland they are conditions on a public entertainment licence under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 s.41 — which may fix the days and times and cap admissions — but only where the licensing authority has resolved that s.41 applies to places of that class, because s.9 makes ss.38 to 43 effective in an authority's area only so far as it has so resolved. If neither applies to your site, nobody has set your hours, there is nothing to enter, and the check compares nothing. Northern Ireland is not covered: it has no Public Health Act 1961 s.75, and its entertainment licensing sits in different legislation which we have not researched.

Enter the hours your byelaw or licence sets beside the gate window under Generate ▸ Attendance & demand, and the check compares the design's gate window against them. Until you do, the finding is a prompt, and it says so.

The gov.uk model byelaw 4 for pleasure fairs leaves the hours blank for the council to insert; its guidance notes say a manager should not be required to close before 9pm, nor be allowed to stay open after midnight, nor need the fair open before 10am. That is guidance to councils about what a byelaw should impose — not a limit on your event, and the app never treats it as one. The rides themselves are not licensable entertainment under the Licensing Act 2003 (Schedule 1, Part 1, para 2): a premises licence or Temporary Event Notice is needed only for alcohol, late-night refreshment, or regulated entertainment such as music and dance laid on alongside.

One honest limitation: the design holds a gate-window length and no opening time, so the check compares lengths. It cannot tell you whether your window starts inside the licensed one.

The power sums, and what they leave out

The Generator capacity line is arithmetic on the design's own figures: the kVA of every generator placed for the live days, against the sum of each ride's and stall's own kVA at full load, for the units on site on those days. A build-only ride is not counted against the live generators. Four things it will not do:

• No diversity factor. No open UK source publishes one for a fairground, so any allowance for rides not drawing their peak together — and any spare-capacity headroom — would be ours. None is applied, and the finding says so.
• No partial total. If any unit on site has no kVA figure, the total is not made at all and nothing is compared: a sum of some of the rides could not pass or fail anything.
• Running or starting load is not recorded on the objects, and fairground rides have large start-up surges, so a fair may need more than the figure shown.
• Nothing is claimed about the distribution. Temporary electrical distribution follows BS 7909, which we cite by its existence only — it is a paid standard and we have not read it.

With no generator placed the line is a note naming what to draw, not a warning: a showman's ride often brings its own generator, and a design that has not been given one yet must not carry a permanent warning that says nothing true about it. With no attendance saved the provision comparison does not run at all — and silence there is not a pass.

The Wales byelaw figure is a template, never the default

The Welsh Government's model byelaws for pleasure fairs and roller skating rinks (set 4, 2015), clause 5(i), ask that a site be arranged to allow fire-appliance access to within 50 m of any structure. That is the one fairground-specific layout figure anybody publishes, and it ships as a second built-in rule pack — "UK events + Wales model byelaw template" — selectable beside the pack name in the checks panel.

It is not the default, and the reason is on the tin: a model byelaw is a template, not law anywhere until a council adopts it, the English model set (2018) no longer contains the clause at all, and we have not checked whether any adopted byelaw still carries it. Under the default pack the check is silent rather than saying "not checked", because printing a gap on every English site would imply a hole in the law that does not exist.

The clause's other figures — routes not normally less than 4 m wide, no overhead obstruction under 4.5 m, about 12 tonnes — are deliberately not in the pack. Nothing in the app checks headroom or axle load, and route width is measured against the gov.uk appliance figure of 3.7 m that the emergency route check already uses. A pack entry that changed nothing would be worse than no entry, because choosing it would imply it did something. Where a ride's only nearby surface is an indicative vehicle route, the finding is a note asking you to confirm it — an unconfirmed line cannot satisfy an appliance-access test. Where nothing drivable is drawn at all, there is one note saying the distance cannot be measured, not a warning on every ride.

A ride on the emergency route

A ride, stage or marquee standing on a built trackway or carriageway is now reported by the Emergency route check as obstructing the route to that zone. Previously only an indicative vehicle route's obstructions were tested, so a ride parked on a finished trackway went unmentioned — which is what the check was always documented to cover (HSG175 paras 181–182: emergency-vehicle access, including to hydrants, while the public is evacuating; HSG195 para 490: an amusement must not block the emergency access routes). This changes results on existing designs, and the change is a fix rather than a new threshold: the basis and every figure are unchanged.

A witness counts only where it stands on the drivable surface itself. The swept path's legitimate overhang on a bend is still reported separately, as it always was, so an object standing beside a curve is not counted twice.

The Fairground event type

Fairground / funfair is the sixth event type under Generate ▸ Attendance & demand. Choosing it fills the seven editable fields below and nothing else — no attendance, no arrival shape, no fire-risk level and no threshold. Every one of the seven is ours: no open UK source publishes a travelling fair's stand, its opening length or its modal share, and the dialog says so under the picker.

Choosing it also makes the AI render prompt read "a UK outdoor funfair", and the hours prompt above appears before the first ride is placed — the hours are the fair's question whether or not anything has been drawn yet.

What no ride check will ever say

Pinned by a test, not by good intentions. No ride finding will:

• say or imply that a ride is safe, or unsafe;
• assert anything about a Declaration of Operational Compliance being held, current or valid — that is the controller's document, and the organiser's duty is to check it before the fair;
• state a wind limit — it comes from the ride's own operations manual, and HSG175 publishes no figure;
• state a height limit of any kind;
• use the words breach or non-compliant, or say that anything "fails" a scheme;
• present a figure of ours as a published requirement, or leave out the word ours where the figure is ours;
• report a pass for something that was not measured — a missing data seam is a note that says why.

Queue length, queue area, waiting time and viewing space are not checked. The concern is published — HSG175 para 182 asks that no point channel the public into dangerous overcrowding in an emergency and says extra space may be needed round popular attractions; HSG195 para 491 asks for room for people queuing and for family and friends to watch — but no UK source publishes a size. The static check asks only whether the opening discharges onto clear ground; how a crowd behaves round a ride over a day belongs to Crowd simulation. There is no noise check: the fairground guidance on noise is about workers, and the statutory nuisance duty gives no level.

Every source behind these checks, with the page it was read on and whether we may reuse it, is listed under Sources and what is ours. The Purple Guide is cited by its existence only — its terms forbid commercial reuse and database creation, so no text or table from it appears anywhere in these checks.