Alpy — free ski app

Lift lines: the only honest queue tracker has your name on it

Every skier knows the feeling: the day felt great, but somewhere an hour evaporated into lift queues. Alpy now measures that hour — and tells you which lifts ate it.

How it measures a queue

When your tracked day is saved, the app looks at the gap between each run’s end and the following lift ride, scanning backwards from the moment the climb starts and adding up the time you were essentially stationary (under about 0.6 m/s — standing, with shuffle-forward moments tolerated). Scanning backwards matters: it’s what keeps your lunch out of the number, because the walk from the restaurant to the lift breaks the standing streak. The result is labeled an estimate, because GPS genuinely cannot tell a lift line from you finishing a sandwich at the base — but the backwards scan makes the honest cases land right.

Each wait is then matched to a named lift by comparing the ascent that follows with the resort’s OpenStreetMap lift lines — your track hugs the lift you actually rode.

What you see

In the day’s debrief, a Lift Lines card: total minutes waiting, then a bar per lift — “Gondola ×3 · ~11 min”. Once a lift has enough rides in your history, a season line appears underneath: average wait, ride count, and a morning/afternoon split. That last one is the quietly useful number: many lifts queue hard at 9:30 and walk on at 13:30, and after a few tracked days your own data shows exactly which.

Walk-on rides count as zero-minute waits on purpose. If they didn’t, “average wait” would secretly mean “average wait when there was a line” — a worst case dressed up as a typical one.

Why not live crowds?

Apps with servers can show live lift waits by aggregating thousands of users. Alpy has no server, no accounts, and sends nothing off your phone — that’s a founding constraint, not a missing feature. So the card says what it is: your own days only; this can’t see today’s crowds, only your history with them. For planning your own week at your own resort, that history turns out to be most of what you wanted anyway.

Lift Lines appears automatically in the Ski Debrief of any tracked day with a couple of minutes of queueing. Free, like the rest of Alpy.