The Numbers Game

So when he was in Langley after his visit to the CIA yesterday The Donald falsely claimed that his Inauguration drew about 1 to 1.5 Million people (I hope you don’t ask me for a transcript, nobody seems to have one, here’s a story from the Washington Post instead). Later on Sean Spicer walked back that number a little bit, as well he might. Most experts think it was considerably less with the consensus averaging somewhere between 220,000 and 250,000.

Not too shabby, that’s a lot of people.

Now, I was at the Women’s March on Washington so I have a lived experience to base my personal crowd size estimates on (the “Official” estimate is between 650,000 and most experts say somewhere between 1 and 1.2 Million), and I’m happy to explain my methodology.

You could clearly see and photographs confirm the the crowd stretched from at least 3rd St SW (the start of the March) all the way to the Washington Monument (15th St SW). Conservatively.

The distance from 3rd St SW to 15th St SW is 5456 feet. The distance from Constitution Av. to Independence Av. is 1584 feet. Multiply those together and you get a volume of 8 642 304 square feet.

Now let’s assume that each individual consumes 6 square feet of space. This is a generous estimate, my lived experience is that there wasn’t actually enough room to fall down and hit the ground.

I personally sampled at least 75% of the volume in question and I have reliable reports from observers of the remaining space that conditions didn’t change.

So it becomes a simple equation. 8 642 304 / 6 == 1 440 384, QED.

At least 1.4 Million people were at the Women’s March on Washington.

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  1. Vent Hole

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