Road Warrior: No Balloon Fiesta traffic construction amid congestion

Balloon Fiesta building ban: At Balloon Fiesta, you can expect to see hundreds of hot air balloons, hundreds of thousands of visitors and the traffic to match.

But while you’ll see backed-up roads around Balloon Fiesta Park, there’s one thing you won’t see: road construction. Although orange cones may line the streets around the park, they won’t be to block open construction sites.

Between Sept. 30 and Oct. 15, the area around the Balloon Fiesta is kept construction-free to prevent unnecessary traffic. It’s one of the few times per year, including the State Fair, that the city issues a moratorium on road construction. Emergencies and ongoing projects can have the restrictions waived.

The moratorium includes Roy Road/Tramway, I-25, Osuna and Second and every street lassoed by the roads, as well as Old Town, Uptown and the Cottonwood Mall.

The next moratorium is during the holiday shopping season.

Celebrity spotting: She may have retired her Road Warrior title, but D’Val Westphal hasn’t hit the brakes.

Now employed at the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, Westphal spoke Thursday to a group of transportation professionals at the New Mexico Intelligent Transportation Society’s 2023 conference.

During her speech, Westphal recalled her 28 years of writing the column and a time before the Big I and the Montaño Bridge, which one industrious driver flew over in 1996 when the crossing was still yet-to-be completed.

“Mr. Gray Car reportedly came tearing up the east side — yeah, the side that doesn’t have a road — and crossed at a pretty good clip,” Westphal wrote. “That means he had to travel the dirt version of Montaño to the river, maneuver around machinery and up a dirt grade before getting to the almost complete $8.2 million crossing. He reportedly hit the pavement at 40 mph.”

The conference demonstrated new transit technologies and taught people how to leverage AI in transit. But despite those innovations, Westphal said that while some things change in the transit world, others never do.

“You can’t engineer out stupid,” Westphal said.