Theme-park visitor movement in Southern California: GPS tracks, visit timetables, exit survey, and park GIS (2026)

This dataset records how individual visitors move through theme parks. Twenty-three consenting adults each carried a 1 Hz GPS logger through one of three Southern-California parks, including Knott's Berry Farm, Disneyland, or Disney California Adventure, on operating days in March 2026, and completed a short exit survey on return. (Four park-hoppers visited both Disney parks, giving 26 analyzed park-visits in total.) From each track, the visitor's day was coded into a sequence of point-of-interest (POI) stops with arrival and departure times and walked-versus-shortest-path distances, summarized into per-visit movement metrics (time in park, walking speed, distance traveled, visit and attraction rates, route directness, dwell time, and more), and tagged with a movement-style label (wader, swimmer, or diver). Each visitor's exit-survey responses (prior visitation, planning, priorities, map use, self-described movement) are included as well. Contents and structure. The data is organized one folder per park (kbf/, dlr/, dca/), each with the same layout, in open formats (CSV and GeoPackage): tables/: participants, per-visit movement metrics, the stop-by-stop timetable, and exit-survey responses; gps/: raw and cleaned GPS point tracks (longitude/latitude, elevation, speed, local time-of-day); gis/: park boundary, walkways, commercial and attraction areas, and a points-of-interest layer (all parks); Knott's additionally includes a walkway routing network (PathNetwork) used for shortest-path and agent-based modeling; heatmaps/: observed occupancy rasters (GeoTIFF) for each movement type — waders, swimmers, divers, and all participants. A code/ folder accompanies the data with the analysis and agent-based-simulation code that regenerates the associated article's data-driven figures, tables, and statistics directly from these files (see code/README.md). Within each park, every file is keyed by participant_id; see README.md for full field definitions. The data supports analyses of pedestrian movement, dwell and routing behavior, visitor segmentation, and spatial or agent-based modeling of theme-park circulation. De-identification and ethics. Data were collected under Princeton University IRB Protocol #19130 with informed consent. Participants appear only as codes; GPS timestamps give local time-of-day with calendar dates removed; coordinates are WGS84 (EPSG:4326). This is a small, non-representative sample collected on a few operating days; best treated as a pilot/exemplar rather than a representative survey. The reproduction code is included in this record under code/, and a related study by the authors is linked under the record's Related works. The data are released under CC-BY-4.0 and the code under the MIT License. Theme-park and attraction names appear only for geographic context and remain the property of their respective owners.