At the banquet, the Washington Times reporter received a call. She said her source at the DC police said that the crowd was estimated by the DC police to be 2.6 million. Obama’s inaugaration doesn't come close to this estimate.
She mentioned one of the parameters used for estimating the crowd was the metro ridership for the day. We need access to all the normal ways of estimating the crowd, metro ridership, number of buses, train capacity, airlines, the best photos for density. number of people, depth of the crowd marching across one spot per second on Pennsylvania Ave, How many were already at the Capitol(some camped out all night to get a good spot) and any other ways they have to measure the crowd.
Why are the estimated so low? We need to get the truth out about the size of the crowd.
On our way out of town, I went hunting for a Washington Times paper. I found one at a 7-11. They had gone along with the same low estimates. I know for a fact that they had received much higher estimates from their sources.
We also heard around 11 am from others in the crowd that Fox, CNN, and ABC gave a 2 million estimate.
Why did Fox, the Washington Times, and the rest of the news media end up low balling this historic turnout?
From what I understand the reason why we don't have official estimates is that the Park service has been forbidden to give out estimates since the million man march which was actually only a few hundred thousand.
I guess the inauguration is a ticketed event, so they can claim, all the tickets they gave out.
Washington doesn't want us to know how many people are really protesting the government.
Let's get the word out. Surely, we can find experts in crowd density to look at the photos we have, and the size of the area, to get a reasonable estimate.
Can't we as citizens find out what the ridership on the metro was that day?