…from Matt Welch, who wandered out to the mall to see it..
[Late evening update]
Per the discussion in comments, a graphical tale of “left” versus “right” events on the mall.
[Late Sunday night update, with a bump]
Henry Vanderbilt (who should start a blog on space transportation and other topics) sends an analysis of the crowd size via email. He says it’s clearly six figures — hundreds of thousands:
I’ve taken a look at the available hard data on the crowd size at yesterday’s DC Tea Party, and (FWIW), by two different crowd-count methods based on two different data sources (one of these including the New York Times report). It’s definitely “hundreds of thousands.” Not “millions”, no, nor mere “tens of thousands” as all the major media outlets are putting it. Hundreds of thousands. Two analyses follow in detail, to allow criticism of the methodology and addition of better data.
Analysis 1: This gives a range of 240,000 to 320,000 marchers down Pennsylvania Ave, and is based on the time-lapse march route video plus measurements of the route taken from Google Maps. The time-lapse sequence was taken from a webcam over Freedom Plaza at 14th St and E NW, looking ESE down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol. The time-lapse video is 41 seconds long (0-40), is labelled as covering 8 AM to 1130 AM on 9/12/09, and thus scales at just over five minutes real-time per second of video. The video shows the march starting out of Freedom Plaza at 17 seconds (~9:30 AM) with the tail end leaving the plaza at 36 seconds (~11:10 AM). Google Maps sat view, meanwhile, shows Pennsylvania Ave. to be just over 220 feet wide (eight traffic lanes plus sidewalks) along the march route, and the length of the march route from the exit of Freedom Square to where the road reaches the Capitol West Lawn to be just over 4400 feet. The video seems to indicate marchers filled both road and sidewalks for the entire march route for most of the time of the march, FWIW.
The video does not seem to provide enough resolution, spatial or time, to directly measure the rate of advance of the march. The speed with which the route initially fills up shouldn’t be used (the fast ones always end up out front) nor the speed with which it empties (the slow ones are at the back). I’ll make the assumption here that the march averaged 1 mph – large dense peaceable crowds tend to have much internal friction and move slowly, 1-2 mph in my experience; I think 1 mph is mildly conservative.
So we know the crowd took ~100 minutes to march past the east end of Freedom Square on a route ~220 feet wide, and we’re assuming they averaged a 1 mph rate of advance. That would make the entire crowd about 8800 feet long by 220 feet wide (had the route of march actually been that long). In other words, the crowd occupied about 1.94 million square feet at their march density, at an assumed march speed of 1 mph.
We now need a second assumption: how tightly packed the crowd was as they marched.
I estimate that a really tightly jammed crowd (stage-front at a concert) takes about two square feet per person. A dense elbow-to-elbow crowd on the move is three to four square feet per person, and a polite relaxed crowd on the move is six or more square feet per person. This marching crowd seemed very densely packed in the overhead video, but from various closeups I’ve seen it seemed more like 6-8 square feet per person. 1.94 million square feet divided by six square feet per marcher gives about 320,000 marchers; divided by 8 gives about 240,000 marchers.
To sum up, the width of the march route and the time for the march to pass one point are known. The two main assumptions in this crowd estimate are the average speed of the march and the average spacing of the marchers. 1 mph and 6-8 square feet per person seem mildly conservative estimates; based on those we get a crowd size of multiple hundreds of thousands.
Note too that this march-route estimate does not cover anyone who arrived at the march destination by other routes.
Analysis 2: This one gives a range of 330,000 to 500,000 demonstrators in front of the Capitol, and is based on the NYT description of the crowd (“A sea of protesters filled the west lawn of the Capitol and spilled onto the National Mall) plus the first photo in the story at the Daily Mail, showing the Capitol West Lawn during the protest, plus measurements taken from Google Maps sat view of the area.
The overall West Lawn of the Capitol area is a square just over 1500 feet on a side. Between the Reflecting Pool, the Botanic Gardens building, and various other obstructions, I estimate about 75% of that area is actually available for a crowd. That’s comes out to about 1.7m square feet.
The National Mall, meanwhile, consists of eight squares of about 600 by 600 feet each, (about 360,000 square feet each) in a line west to the Washington Monument. I will assume for this analysis that the crowd described by the NYT extended only to the first of these eight blocks, giving us 1.7m + 360K square feet, or about 2 million square feet of crowd.
Crowds at rest take less room than crowds on the move; I therefore assume a range of 4 to 6 square feet per person in this crowd. The above-pointered picture in the Daily Mail seems to support the 4 square feet end of this range, but it was taken from just east of the Reflecting Pond and shows the front portion of the crowd – the crowd density likely drops further back. However, there is also uncertainty about just how far back the crowd goes – at least one attendee claimed in a blog comment that the crowd described by the NYT extended the entire length of the Mall. Applying the 4 to 6 square foot range to the West Lawn plus first block of Mall area seems reasonable for now, absent better data. This gives us an estimated 330,000 to 500,000 demonstrators in front of the Capitol yesterday.
Obviously there are significant error bands in both of these estimates. There’s also room for better data; in particular I’d be interested in any marchers who accurately timed their march from leaving Freedom Square to first arriving at 3rd St where the West Lawn starts, as well as any more info on how far back along the Mall the crowd extended and how dense the crowd was.
I think it’s already very clear, however, that “hundreds of thousands” is the correct description of the size of the 9/12/09 DC protest.
I wasn’t there, but the pictures I’ve seen look like a lot of people. This is the kind of analysis that it would be nice to get from journalists, but most of them went into the profession because (among other reasons) they were told there would be no math.
[Bumped]
[Monday updates]
Bruce Webster has thoughts and pictures. And the Gormogons have turned the analysis up to eleven. They think there are on the order of a million people.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Another analysis over at Pajamas Media. Again, on the order of a million.
[Update on Thursday morning, the 17th]
Pajamas has a new post on the subject.
This got cycled down, attendance wise, just the 300,000, became a Million Man March.
The first reports on local news said TENS of thousands, later that became, just, thousands. Sounds like typical MSM reporting to me. Instead of reporting the news, they made it.(up.)
One observation my wife and I had hasn’t been reported elsewhere is a contrast between this crowd and that which attended the Inauguration this year. There was no trash strewn around yesterday. All discards were made in trash receptacles, and when those overfilled, neat piles were established beside them.
The Inaugural crowd, whose sensitivity to matters environmental and concern for the Earth is supposedly unmatched, left behind a field of debris that took days to clean up.
Just an observation…
Actually, one of Instapundit’s commenters noted that yesterday.
This pattern goes all the way back to a Rush Limbaugh event years ago in Fort Collins that was called “Dan’s Bake Sale” — according to Limbaugh, city officials told him the site was left cleaner than the organizers found it.
I’ve seen no comment in the MSM, but am sure that it will get around.
Thanks for posting that, Rand. The lack of media clarity on yesterday’s demo size has been annoying me, especially given the availability of real data, so I did some quick analyses. Not quite the same as analyzing Energia-lite’s likely performance from a blurry AvWeek photo back in the day, but still fun.
One quibble – “six figures” implies at least a hundred thousand, and I’d say the evidence indicates this demonstration was at minimum still over two hundred thousand, and most likely three hundred thousand-plus, possibly as large as five hundred thousand. “Hundreds of thousands” is the non-misleading and defensible description.
Make that two quibbles – it was a lot easier to come up with new and interesting angles on space and such back when you and Clark Lindsey and Jeff Foust and the rest weren’t all over things so much, covering things so well. I don’t think I could justify my own blog these days – at least not without working at it a whole lot harder! And I’m just getting over three-years-at-a-startup burnout; I’m keeping my options open as to what I will work hard at next.
best regards
Henry Vanderbilt
hvanderbilt@mindspring.com
The conflict will be resolved to the lowest plausible figure by the establishment press and their clients; numerous, bellicose and highly placed. It will have to be done again. Larger. And then again. Still larger. Really, no one who makes decisions is going to give a damn until midterms. That is around tax day of next year.
I was there, the crowd wasn’t just what you see in the traffic cam.
We joined the march around 9:30 at 900 st. I was on the left side of the capital, near the largest tree and that area was packed.
People were coming from all directions and they kept flowing in for 3 hours.
The media isn’t biased, it’s complicit in the fed govt corruption.
I’ve read a back-of-the-envelope calc from an attendee who puts the total around, for the whole day, a cool one million.
A rough order of magnitude estimate is very easily accomplished. Examine the photo of the parade route from the Capitol to the Mall at maximum extent. Picture in your mind large concert or sporting event = fix the footprint in your mind. Overlay the known headcount from the event or concert over the photo. Extrapolate from there. 300,000+ seems very reasonable to me. The government run media has definitely attempted to manipulate the count. First by overestimation (2 million? I think not), then by undercounting – “tens of thousands.” Don’t be fooled – use your common sense. 300,000 real Americans showing up to reject the Republicrat Party’s tax and spend platform doesn’t fit the narrative.
The fight is over already. They got their “tens of thousands” figure into the mainstream press. We can argue about it forever, that won’t change. What also won’t change is that congressmen don’t get to that position by being stupid about politics, and the congressmen have a pretty good idea of the real figures, and that is who we were trying to impress.
We freepers are crowd-sourcing an analysis at this Google Docs spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/12xew6
For what its worth i read this tweet:
RockfordTparty: Any bus going to Washington for the 912 rally must get a parking permit. Currently 4500 permits have been issued: ~250,000 people.
I agree that the crowd was huge, much larger than the MSM will admit.
But the margins of error in the assumptions mean that the calculations are of little use. Big variation in the estimates of walking speed (100% range), density, etc., multiplied together, give huge error bars.
By the way, it may interest you to know that Harry Truman used the estimate of 2 people per square yard (4.5 square feet each) when he made a similar political crowd calculation in the as-told-to-book PLAIN SPEAKING.
Two observations.
One is, where did this come from? There were mass demonstrations in multiple cities on immigration, but the Left is supposed to be good at organizing these kinds of things. The demonstrations were not unexpected — I went to Spanish-language Mass at church one weekend, and very earnest-looking organizers were handing out literature afterwards in the back. Who is organizing these demonstrations?
Second, we are learning from Mr. Ahmadinejad that if demonstrations don’t get press coverage, they don’t effectively happen.
Go look up the “Google Maps planometer” and you can calculate the area covered by the marchers directly. The video appears to show Penn Av covered from the Freedom Plaza to the Capitol; that’s about 60,000 m^2. Looking at videos of the actual march from ground-level, I think 1 person per square meter is a maximum limit on the crowd density during the march.
Comparably, the area covered by people around the Washington Monument during the inauguration was roughly the same. People were packed probably five or so times more densely in that area, and that was a small part of the total area densely covered in an event that drew about 1.8M people.
I have no clue who can look at the Daily Mail pic and think that that’s 3-4 sq feet per person. It’s not even close to that. I was impressed by the turn out when I caught the Penn Av video on the local news, but there’s no reason to delude yourselves.
Crowd size. From snapshot of the video feed. Length from point of shot to Capitol x width of street (derived from sat image on Google) divided by 2.5 (figure used in most large crowd control counts) = Works out to about 350,000 STANDING only on the main street at that point in time…not counting the side streets and those still moving into the march….
Also consider that for every person present – how many were unable to attend..due to work, school, kids, health, etc. (3, 4, 5,…….20)
Message to Obama and Congress…an awful lot of folks dont like you and your agenda….and they are the majority that are the producers and the REAL taxpayers in this country……
One thing that could explain the disparity between the first estimate and the second is that people continued arriving throughout. It is possible both are correct: that the march had 240,000 to 320,000 people and that later, at the Capitol, there were 330,000 to 500,000.
The day of the event, NBC’s Tom Costello covered it, and said that the crowd size was “tens of thousands in the Park Service estimate, but hundreds of thousands in our own estimate…’ attaboy Tom!!
We arrived from Delaware at about 10:45AM. Although people gathered around 9-9:30AM, the march did not actually start till 11AM. We were in the middle third. The march did not end till well after noon, maybe later. People were all around the Capitol and down the mall, all the way to the Wash Monument. I think The numbers cited were not accurate if they only depended on counts by 11:30AM. BTW: there were at least two helicopters overhead. Surely they took pictures? Who were they?
One thing to keep in mind here is I was deliberately conservative in my assumptions in making these estimates. 240K-320K on the march itself was based on the assumption that the marchers averaged 6 to 8 square feet per person, and averaged 1 mph. Now, from http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/2009/09/912-march-it-wasnt-just-numbers.html, there’s actual data – someone had a people-meter at 11th St along the march route and counted 450,000 people passing. Go with the higher crowd density and assume the actual march pace was closer to 1.4 mph, and voila, 450,000, matching the actual count on the route. There’s nothing like real-world data to refine an analytical model.
Stacy McCain goes on to provide considerable additional data from onsite about transport backups slowing arrivals, people arriving via routes other than the march, and people arriving and leaving the whole time. Combined with the photos I’ve seen since of LOTS of protesters backed up across 3rd St and down the Mall, it starts to make an overall total in the high hundreds of thousand, possibly approaching a million, look highly plausible.
Bottom line: All the media outlets minimizing the turnout as “tens of thousands” need to be firmly corrected. It was provably “hundreds of thousands”. I’m sure there are people reading here who’d enjoy the exercise
Henry Vanderbilt
We went through this same sort of nonsense when I was protesting the Vietnam War in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In those days, the MSM was very pro-war (yes, they do seem to have forgotten that fact), and every demonstration in Washington was routinely trivialized and minimized in exactly the same fashion as the MSM and the Obamistas have been doing with the “Tea Parties”. We were paid demonstators, we were a “lunatic fringe”, we weren’t typical of how Americans felt, etc. Crowds were routinely undercounted, so the demonstrations just kept getting bigger…and bigger…and bigger, until in April 1970 a million people came to Washington. Nixon had a double row of DC Transit buses parked around the White House as an extra line of defense. We shut the city down…and THAT demonstration was neither underreported nor trivialized by the MSM. So keep trying!
As a marcher I think you should know that as we were marching toward the Capital I pointed out to my wife the large number of people that joined the march at every intersection we passed, notwithstanding the fact that cross trafic was blocked. My guess is that these savy folks realized that by moving along pararel streets they could join up further on and get closer to the front. They were clearly not picked up by the traffic cams focused on the main march.
My 2-3 cents, late as usual. I can’t comment on the first analysis (Pennsylvania Avenue), since we didn’t get there until after the protestors had moved on to the Capitol building – Metro was jammed.
As to the second analysis, I posted a short video clip (Protest Ends) on Shadow’s World that was taken as the protest ended with the singing of God Bless America. I was standing about 100 yards from the speakers’ podium and panned from the Washington Monument to the Capitol building, and would agree that my video pretty well confirms the analysis.
And as this was toward the end of the protest, I suspect it underestimates the total crowd size.
Half a million is, I think, a realistic estimate.
“but most of them went into the profession because (among other reasons) they were told there would be no math.”
Most of them went into the profession believing they could make up their own math in support of their cause, without being called on it. The reality of their error is slowly dawning on them.
The most accurate crowd count would be based on Porta-Potty volume.
I would guess there were at least three times as many viewers as CNN in their prime time slot…I was there and the Capitol police said it was the largest and best behaved crowd they have ever seen …including the six million (yeah right) for the Inaguaration….Everyone on the bus I was on said they would come back anytime they were needed…we are going to win!!!!
From past rallys I’ve been to on the Mall, I’d say this is closer to 1 million. First because of logistics the number of marchers was always less than the rally crowd. The subway gets backed up, people can’t all march, etc. The largest that I’ve attended was approx 250k and surrounded the Washinton Monument and stretched a little towards the Linoln Memorial. with large spaces (maybe 15ft+ wide) at places). smallest was probably 40k. The Mall tends to swallow up and make large gatherings look smaller. Tree lines split the area, not everyone goes into the designated areas, many come and go for extended breaks. Someone mentioned busses. Some rallys busses are main transportation. For this I would think more would drive separately, due to the individualistic nature of this movement. I didn’t attend this one, so not sure. But here’s the question how many smaller rally’s across the country occurred at the same time. 15-20 per state, maybe 1000 or more? Average a 1000 people at each of those and total for the day could be several million. Plus I attended a rally Sunday. Quick Estimate of 300-400.
Rand:
I just completed an extensive analysis. Based on the average per capita garbage tonnage left by the 1,000,000 people at the Obama inauguration, I am estimating there were 0.341 people at the rally (margin of error = 1.6 Starbucks cups).
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/01/hope-change-apocalyptic-garbage-blizzards.html
Gauging it from the March for Life (usually 250k-500k), I would say that there were more than half a million. (I am not an expert, though I am a native Washingtonian and have seen more than a few demonstrations.) The people were fanned out around the Capitol front rather than confined to particular spaces, so it was larger than it may have appeared. Of course, the naysayers maintain that there were but a handful of “right wing nuts”–such is their need to diminish the impact of a startlingly large group of folks.
When I walked around the crowd with another priest, it was very dense. Crowds poured into the march from side streets along the way, and, when our contingent started from Freedom Plaza, Pennsylvaia Avenue was full for the whole route.
I will also note that it was one of the most polite groups of people I have ever encountered. There was little or no noticeable organization–just some volunteers giving direction. The marchers were orderly, civil and, yet, very intent about being heard. Their focus was properly directed to the statists and corporatists they had come to protest.
I am proud to have been there.
Best,
Fr. C.
FYI, Washington DC police reported to the EMS unit down on the Mall that in their opinion the total attendance -including the Mall, the side streets of Constitution Ave and PA Avenue, the area north and south of the Capitol and all inbound multi-passenger vehicles numbered around 3.5 million.
Supposedly, hundreds of vehicles were effectively turned away from the Capitol Hill area in the morning because the traffic congestion was too great.
Still 3.5 million is excessive.
From what I can tell the body count is substantially North of 500,000 people.
I suspect that the NRO has already tasked a Big Bird to Keyhole the march and they’ve head counted everyone by now.
The Obama goons will release the numbers tha tthe NRO comes up with if they have number sshowing that the marchers number less than 100,000. If ht enumbers go over 500,000 you’ll never hear the final figure until Obama leaves the White House.
Heard that it could be around 2m
Olby will probably put it around 200
Re: “This is the kind of analysis that it would be nice to get from journalists, but most of them went into the profession because (among other reasons) they were told there would be no math.”
At least John Tierney of the New York Times is honest about this: his blog says, John Tierney always wanted to be a scientist but went into journalism because its peer-review process was a great deal easier to sneak through.
“I wasn’t there, but the pictures I’ve seen look like a lot of people.”
Well, I was there and I think the estimates of 60-70K are about right. The crowd was on the west lawn and around the reflecting pool to about 3rd St. with a few more on the Mall between 3rd and 4th. It wasn’t that dense until you got really close to the stage. There were people sitting down on blankets in places.
You could have fit everybody in a decent-sized football stadium.
Funny you should mention a “decent-sized football stadium.” I had the opportunity to walk down the stadium at the local college yesterday. I have been there with a measured crowd of 20,000 (ticket sales are pretty accurate). 60-70000 is way too few. 300,000+ with the error bar all on the up side is much more accurate. Not that the state run media will report it that way.
The time-lapse video of people marching up the avenue doesn’t tell the whole story at all.
Not everyone approached the Mall/Capitol along the same route, and some were earlier and some were later and some left in the middle, etc.
What about people approaching the Capitol from Union Station, the MARC and Metro stop? That must be a gargantuan number. Or from the opposite side of the Capitol from the Mall? Or straight down the Mall from, for example, the Smithsonian Metro stop? Or from behind the Agriculture Building?
Can we get some traffic figures from Metro, or is that a hopeless cause?
The March on Washington was about a quarter million strong. People were densely packed from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington monument during the speeches. This area is twice that covered by Saturday’s march (and no I’m not including the reflecting pool). There’s no way it topped 100,000 people. Go check out pictures of the September 2005 anti-war march of around 150,000 people to see what that number actually means when it comes to marching crowds.
It was an impressive turnout but there’s no reason to be silly.
Zach: If a quarter million people took up twice the area of this crowd, that would imply this crowd is half of a quarter million, or 125,000. How do you get that it was clearly less than 100k?
The DC metro was jammed. I would also point out that some people were leaving as others were coming. Finally, there were a lot of people coming up and down side streets to Pennsylvania Ave. Chose whatever number you want, this 9/12 protest was huge and most unexpected even by the organizers who expected 25,000 to 30,000.