Fact check on the crowd yesterday! Washington Post Blog Writer attempted to attend

[sce56]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/politics/blog-network/2010/10/cbs_estimate_of_215000_at_stew.html?hpid=topnews

CBS' Estimate of 215,000 at Stewart/Colbert Rally is Wildly Low
Blue Virginia 7:14 AM ET, 10/31/2010

Just at it did with the Beck/Palin rally, CBS News commissioned an independent, non-political firm (AirPhotosLive.com) to estimate attendance at the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert Sanity/Fear event yesterday. The result? 215,000 yesterday for fun and sanity vs. 87,000 for Beck/Palin's bizarre version of "honor." Good news, right? Well, yeah, except that the AirPhotosLive.com estimate of yesterday's rally is almost certain to be wildly low. How so? Three reasons.

1. For anyone who tried taking Metro yesterday, you know that it was completely FUBAR. For instance, if you lived any further east than Vienna, Virginia, you had close to zero chance of getting on an Orange Line train in the hours leading up to the rally. I personally tired to do this around 10-11 pm at Virginia Square Metro in Arlington, and it was "nothing doing."

How many of the tens of thousands of people who wanted to take Metro but were not able to do so ever got to the rally is beyond me, but my guess is that the vast majority simply gave up after realizing it was hopeless. Presumably, the same thing was happening on other lines, as the Metro person I spoke to at Virginia Square told me that Metro hadn't put any additional trains on, based on an apparently complete breakdown of communications between rally organizers and Metro, but simply operated on normal, very slow (trains at 12-13 minute intervals) weekend schedule. It was a complete debacle, and I don't remember hearing anything of this sort happening at the Palin/Beck rally. WTF? Anyway, add tens of thousands of people who tried to go the rally yesterday but were stymied by Metro.
2. Along with tens of thousands of other people, probably a lot more, I finally made it to the outskirts of the rally, but not to the rally itself. The photo above was taken as I walked with two friends (Eric of Blue Virginia and his wife, Marna) from the Chinatown area towards the rally. Note that we were surrounded by thousands of people, and also note that this was occurring on pretty much ever street heading south from the District towards the rally. At one point, I looked up one of the streets, probably around 7th or 8th NW, and saw swarms of people as far as the eye could see trying (but not succeeding) to make their way towards the rally. None of these people, almost certainly tens of thousands (if not more) if you count all the people on all the streets, are not even in the AirPhotosLive.com photo, which they used to make their estimate.

3. Finally, who knows how many people heard about the impossibility of making it to the actual rally, and simply repaired to a friends' living room, bar, whatever. Obviously, none of those people were counted.

The bottom line: even not accounting for #1-#3 above, there were more than twice as many people on the Mall itself to participate in the "Sanity" rally yesterday compared to the Beck/Palin rally in August. Accounting for #1-#1 above adds tens of thousands of people, possibly hundreds of thousands, to the 215,000 estimate. Let's be conservative, and say 100,000 rallygoers were jampacked on DC streets heading south, stuck on Metro platforms, sitting at bars in DC, etc. That would easily push the numbers yesterday over 300,000, but my bet is that the real total was a lot higher than that.

[Drale]

1. I would also like to see the ratings

from across the country for people who watched the rally (like me) because they could not make it to DC.

[mirrera]

2. I attended from my living room in Maine...

I am waiting to hear from my family who have lived in DC for over 20 years and were planning to attend... I can't wait to hear what they saw!

Thanks for that photo...

[handmade34]

3. all true

I biked over to the Mall from Crystal City... lots of bikers and walkers. I had a passenger and I walked her to the metro before I took off... later she said that she (and a few others) determined that they needed to get on a metro going west and then get off and start toards the Mall from a much further point west... took her a couple of hours...

I was at One Nation and the Rally yesterday was much, much larger than that and the people kept milling in for the entire day.. in droves... quite the experience being on the outskirts (no way to get close enough to see the stage unless one was very early - or in a tree) :)

[spooky3]

4. We did the same thing on the yellow line. If the Metro didn't add any

cars, someone should get kicked to the curb.

[tblue37]

5. They should also count all the tens of thosuands who attended satellite

rallies in other cities around the country and even in other countries around the world!

[sce56]

6. Saw only a short blurb on the local news and it is not on the web sites did not happen!

[The Second Stone]

7. The subway carried 220,000 more than normal

and I didn't take the subway, and many others did not. I'd say at least a quarter of a million.