This is the 54th Balloon Fiesta. Why does traffic still suck?

The 54th Balloon Fiesta opens Saturday.

Last year, on Special Shape Rodeo morning, police turned incoming traffic away. The lots were full.

The crowd isn’t what changed. More than 886,000 visits in 2018. 851,994 last year.

The roads were never big enough. And seven years of fixes have mostly been fixes for cars.

The math nobody can pave around

In 2023, a UNM transportation planner, Claude Morelli, ran the numbers for the state’s traffic engineers in a talk called “Up, Up, and Away.”

His setup: 60,000 people. About three to a car. Two and a half hours to get everyone in.

A freeway lane carries about 2,200 cars an hour.

His answer: 3.4 freeway lanes, each way. Make every car self-driving and it’s still more than two.

Then the real problem: “What happens when the vehicles exit the freeway?”

The city’s own count backs him up. About 4,270 cars in the busiest morning hour, with the backup starting as early as 3 a.m. That’s nearly two freeway lanes of cars, and every one has to get off the freeway to reach the park.

Where it jams

The Fiesta’s own parking map shows four choke points.

1. The Roy/Tramway exit. One of only two I-25 exits to the park. Drivers loop off, run down the frontage road and turn onto Balloon Fiesta Parkway.
2. San Mateo and Balloon Fiesta Parkway. Cars from that exit meet cars coming up San Mateo. Same intersection, same lots.
3. The Alameda exit. The other one. It sends drivers north on San Mateo, one street, to the main lots.
4. Alameda from the west. The West Side gets one instruction in the Fiesta’s guide: “east on Alameda Blvd and follow the signs.” Jefferson is where ride-share drivers drop people off.

Two exits. One road from the west. One intersection where it all meets. No traffic plan fits 4,270 cars an hour through that.

Seven years of fixes, mostly for cars

In 2019, Mayor Tim Keller named four fixes:

• A ramp onto I-25
• A Rail Runner spur to the park
• City buses on Park and Ride
• Better bus routes

Three happened, in some form.

• Buses: ten city buses joined 225 school buses that fall. Half the buses got a second drop-off on Balloon Museum Drive.
• The ramp: it opened in 2022, a $2.5 million job. But the city pitched it as a way to leave faster. It does nothing for the line to get in.

The train didn’t happen.

• A 2018 study, as KRQE reported it, priced a spur at $8.4 million, carrying 1,000 people a trainload.
• The Legislature gave the city $7.5 million for park access, “including a new rail spur and stop.”
• On April 5, 2019, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed the bill and struck those words. The money stayed. Her message gives no reason.

The spur had a real problem. It would have run close to homes along the proposed route, and several nearby neighbors were already preparing to fight the city over it.

In 2022 the city told KRQE it was still looking at a spur. That’s the last public word we could find.

The train is the fix the math points to

The Rail Runner already runs past the park.

Morelli sketched a hypothetical: Fiesta trains slotted into the existing schedule, with a stop at the park. Six trains arrive before the 7 a.m. Mass Ascension.

A rough guess: if each carried the 1,000 people KRQE said the 2018 study planned for, that’s 6,000 people. At his 3.25 people a car, that’s more than 1,800 cars off the road in one morning.

It won’t clear the roads. It takes a slice of the crowd off them with no new pavement.

The fair objection: Rio Metro tried. For three years it ran extra weekend trains to the Los Ranchos/Journal Center station, then a shuttle bus to the park. Up to $40,000 extra. A few thousand riders. Dropped in 2018. “It has to be feasible, financially,” its spokesperson said.

But a train that ends in a bus ride through the same traffic is a harder sell than one that stops at the field.

So, city and Rio Metro: is a platform at the park happening? If not, why not?

The state put $7.5 million toward park access seven years ago. If the train is dead, say so. Say what replaces it.

Otherwise this column runs again next October. So does the line of cars.

Until then, skip the line

The balloons don’t stay over the park. Visit Albuquerque, the tourism bureau, has a list of places to watch from:

• North Domingo Baca Park, off Paseo del Norte and Alameda: a view of the morning Mass Ascension.
• Vista del Norte Park, off Osuna: a popular landing spot.
• The Bosque Trail: on the right wind, balloons pass overhead.
• Your car: a parking lot west of Jefferson between Osuna and Paseo del Norte, or off the I-25 frontage road between Paseo del Norte and Alameda. Pull into a lot. No stopping on the shoulder.

Updated Oct. 14, 2026: We revised this story to source its facts to public records where we could, and removed details and quotes we could not confirm from a record.