About The Balloon FiestaThe Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta is an annual festival of hot air balloons that takes place in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Every year there is around 840,000 people who attend. This causes traffic which can be an inconvenience to the community and many visitors. The traffic causes many crashes and car back ups. The traffic is negative for the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta and we wanted to learn why it gets so backed up and how the situation could be improved. Our team created two programs. The first program is current state of traffic flow to include problem areas. The second program is future improvements for the traffic shown by lanes. This is the team’s second year working on this project. This year the team focused on adding more variables to the program and strengthened our research. The new variables are car density and using an actual map in the program instead of a grid. We researched traffic theory, traffic flow, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This research has helped us learn more about traffic in general which gave us a better understanding of why the Balloon Fiesta traffic moves the way it does. It also gave us ideas for improvement. Another source we used from last year is Civil Engineer Designer, Zak Cottrell. He provided us a map of the actual Balloon Fiesta with roads they normally use and block off, which helped us design our program. He also answered many questions that we had about road engineers and how these engineers design roads for event traffic, like the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. |