With the rousing success of their two-million-strong 60,000+ strong (see below the fold for more on this) 9/12 protest march, the Tea Party organizers are now going for another big protest on October 17th: Operation: Can You Hear Us Now?
And what is "Operation: Can You Hear Us Now?" (O:CYHUN from now on)? It is a call for mass protests in all 50 states to protest the Propaganda people are being fed in the main stream media.... except for Fox News, of course!
Today, that "Fourth Branch" of Government is cracked, all but broken off from the tree of liberty. Its leaves are wilted and it provides no shade or protection from the elements of oppressive government. Today, it dangles precariously in the swirling winds of hope and change, ready to crash to the ground at any moment. Was September 12th, 2009 the point of no return? Has "Big Media" penned it’s own obituary?
On October 17th, 2009 patriots and citizens from around America will gather around the broken branches, calling for their restoration and re-grafting into the tree of liberty. They’ll call for integrity and honor - objectivity and factual reporting. It remains to be seen the what the response will be. I believe another great statement is about to be made – great because the author is... "We The People".
Based on a reading of their site and affiliated sites, it appears that the big problem is that the press did not report the 2,000,000 1.8 million 850,000 200,000 to 300,000 crowd size du jour that the right-wingnut-o-sphere is currently reporting as the crowd size. Since the press is "obviously" lying and ignoring the protest (remember, all of the other major outlets "missed the story" about the 9/12 protests), a call rings out to spank the press!
This is clearly more wingnuttery. Not everyone is reporting these overinflated estimates. Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs (not exactly a bastion of progressive values) called the entire kerfluffle "rather depressing" and a massive Fail. Still, with the most official estimate available (DC Fire Department) putting the crowd at 60,000 to 70,000 people, claims of two million protesters are clearly overblown.
How Overblown are these estimates?
It's an interesting question. We don't have any actual overhead footage of the crowd, and I haven't seen a park service estimate of the crowd. So I decided to take a stab at it from another direction.
The DC Metro Transit Authority keeps track of service disruption reports on their website. Looking them over, the estimates for bus traffic are clearly useless (every Saturday, for example, seems to use the same estimate for weeks at a time), but the train/subway estimates appear to be linked to actual turnstile numbers, and vary quite a bit more. So, I decided to compare traffic differentials.
The image below is information related to the September, 2009 traffic estimates.
Notice the traffic on September 12th, and compare it to the 5th and the 19th. Clearly, traffic was up. Based on these comparisons and other traffic, I estimated the average Saturday metro traffic to be 315,000 people, compared to the 437,000 people shown on the 12th, an increase of approximately 122,000 people.
Here is the equivalent image for January, 2009:
This is a more complex situation. A simplistic comparison of the traffic on Inauguration day (the highest ever recorded by DC Metro, by the way) shows an increase in traffic from a base I estimate (for a Tuesday) to be about 720,000 people. The increase to 1,120,000, or an increase of 400,000 riders, clearly is significantly larger than the 122,000 rider increase for 9/12. Yet this is not the full story here.
We must consider that the US Government was closed down for Inaguration day. The normal 720,000 rider traffic is based on the government being open. Still, a number of people will have come to work, even though things were "closed", just to handle necessary services &c. I will, again generously, cut the normal ridership by 50%, leaving only 360,000 normal riders. This increases the estimated inaguration-related ridership to 760,000 riders
Compare the Sunday and Monday preceding the inauguration with the other Sundays and Mondays in the month. Sunday's ridership of 616,000 is significantly greater than the (generously estimated) 200,000 riders normally using Metro on Sundays, and Monday is also up from the roughly 705,000 average for Mondays by more than 150,000 riders. What should we make of these numbers?
In my considered opinion, a large number of these trips are tourist trips by people there for the Inauguration activities, but some of them will be from people coming into the city ahead of time for the Inaguration. However, based on 25,500+ rooms in the DC area, and the fact that many people were renting space out to tourists during this time frame, with a 98% occupancy rate on the 19th, I am making a semi-WAG estimate of approximately 100,000 people staying in DC within "Walking distance" (based loosely on the reports of people's actual distances walked).
Now, let's take these estimates. The final estimated crowd for the Inaguration, based on reliable sources, seems to run between 800,000 and 1.8 million people. 1.2 million seems to be frequently quoted, so I will use that number. If you believe a different number, go ahead and use it in your calculations.
With the 760,000 rides and 100,000 people staying nearby, that totals 860,000 people accounted for. With the estimate of 1.2m people, that gives us a factor for adjusting metro ridership differential. But wait. Since the 100,000 people that stayed nearby don't count in that estimate, our final adjustment should be (1,200,000 - 100,000) / 760,000 leaves us with a 1.45 multiplier. Multiplying the 122,000 rider increase by 1.45 gives us a net estimate of 176,900. Is this a good estimate? Are there other differences that matter here?
There almost certainly are. IMO, it is likely that more of the people at the 9/12 protests rode transit into town, and that fewer stayed overnight. If this is true, the multiplier for calculating the difference between transit and real numbers decreases, as does the total number attending. However, these factors are beyond my capability to estimate at this time with any rigor at all. If you asked me my best guess for total crowd size, I would probably go with something on the order of 125,000 to 150,000, larger than the official estimates by the Fire department, but smaller than the estimates by the conservabloggers.