Comparing the Metro traffic from Inauguration Day (Tuesday) with a nondescript Sunday from the prior year is far more asinine that anything that the folks trying to estimate the crowd here are doing.
I can’t say that I’m buying anything upwards of a million people. The walking pace was quite slow when compared to a solo stroll, so the 3mph bit was probably a little aggressive. That being said, the square footage per person was probably lower than some are guessing. It was damn near shoulder to shoulder through the bulk of the march.
I’ll also add the following observations, and you can take them for what they’re worth. First, that family reunion thing on the mall consisted of a bunch of nearly empty tents with five or six people inside each one. Anyone trying to use that “crowd” as some sort of mitigating factor is completely off base. If that gathering typically draws 500,000 people, then the march itself must have had seventy bazillion.
Second, if you think that the 60-70,000 figure is accurate (or even anything above ignorant), then you might want to put down the latte and head down to your local college campus next weekend. Here’s one Google Earth pic taken from a height of 3,376 feet and cropped to 290×320 pixels. http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3483/3923429385_121381aafc.jpg
Here’s also a second pic taken from a height of 3,364 feet and cropped to 290×320 pixels. http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2542/3924232990_5447f6b81e.jpg
The football stadium holds 110,000 people and, to my eye, the seating area seems to occupy roughly half the space in the picture. The corresponding area of the Capitol grounds held a relatively small portion of the body of protesters, given that they extended in either sideways direction for several hundred yards and back onto the mall even further.
Bottom line: It was a ton of people. The numbers in the hundreds of thousands seem most plausible to me.
