Charlie,
Your estimate of the crowd size is based upon the area where you say the crowd was, but you don’t provide the boundries of that area. Your calculation is based on an area of 197K sq meters, but it seems to me that the area was actually only about 130K sq meters. In coming up with that figure, I assumed that the area extended 400 feet to the north of the Reflecting Pond, and 320 feet to the south, for the length of the pond (2000 feet). Using the same density estimate, my calculation of the crowd in that area (it doesn’t include those east of the Reflecting Pond near the Washington Monument) is a maximum of 143K. All of the photos that I have seen, including those posted by those who claim that the crowd exceeded 500K, show a lot of area where the crowd clearly was not that densely packed, and undoubtedly some small areas the crowd was more densely packed. But even adding the people who were not in the areas adjacent to the reflecting pond, the AirPhotosLive estimate published by CBS News seems to be much closer to the true size of the crowd than those which suggest that the crowd exceeded 200K.
By the way, this is the first time I have ever visited this website, and I am impressed that the level of discourse here is generally much higher and more civil than on other websites addressing political issues.
