Holly Frey posits that the end of major balloon riots was driven by a decline in ballooning's popularity as a public fad, rather than a fundamental shift in crowd psychology.

“It seems like this was one of the last big balloon riots. Not because of some kind of change in the psychology and dynamics of sometimes drunken crowds, but because ballooning stopped being such a huge fad and it stopped drawing those kinds of crowds of expectant onlookers.”