🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr8.123705.16039@access.digex.com>, jamie@access.digex.com (James Treworgy) writes...
>Just curious... how did you arrive at this estimate? As a good comparison,
>RFK stadium holds 70,000 people.  I think one can safely say there were
>a HELL of a lot more people on the mall than you could fit in RFK stadium.

I stand by my estimate of 130,000 at the march, acquired from
various vantage points at the Capitol end of the Mall. I was not
at the Ellipse, so I don't know how many people were there
before the march. If there were 500,000 or more there, then 75
percent of them went elsewhere than to the east end of the Mall.

I called NOW and asked them if the signatures would be available
for inspection and this is the essence of their answer: They
haven't been counted and are still being gathered (!). They'll
be sent in from state NOW offices. They won't be available for
public inspection... Hey, I'm still pro-feminist, pro-Choice, and
pro-NOW. You better believe me!

Estimating the size of the crowd from the ground was easier than 
for a lot of demonstrations. The stationary crowd was seated on
the Mall in a rectangular area. I looked at the densest clusters
of people and it looked like 10 people per 100 square feet, and
that's being generous.  Then I estimated the ratio of open grass
to seated people in the various sectors of the Mall. Where
people were standing, I called that 20 people per 100 square
feet. I divided the crowd up into sectors of various density and
got the areas from a map. 

As for the moving people, they were all coming down the march
route on 7th Street by 2:30 PM. By 3:00 the Mall crowd wasn't
getting any larger, so people must have been leaving at the same
rate they were marching in, and indeed, people were streaming
westard along the Mall. I made three or four estimates of the
rates of inflow on 7th Street, using a stopwatch. The highest I
got was 500 per minute. The inflow had ended by 4:00 PM, but I
allowed two full hours of "throughput" at 500 per minute and
added this to my estimate of 70,000 on the Mall to get my total
of 130,000.