This seems reasonably fair and balanced. (Note: The photograph of Civic Center seems right but the picture of market street seems to have been taken later in the day after the crowds had moved on.)
An Independent Count at the Jan 18, 2003 San Francisco Anti-War Demonstration
I took as my project for the SF demonstration to do my own crowd estimate to see whether the organizers or the media were giving a better version of the numbers.
We arrived early and started our march from Embarcadaro. By 11:00, the nominal starting time, the street was packed to the point where you couldn’t easily move around in the crowd without people squeezing out of the way to let you by. Some people who had walked ahead and scouted out the parade route said they had gone 15 blocks and still couldn’t see the front of the crowd. They estimated that the entire parade route was essentially filled from the start. It was well over an hour before we started to move.
My estimate of the stationary crowd density was 500 people for each 10 feet along the parade route. That’s 1000 people per 20 feet or upward of 10,000 people in the first city block. To make that more conservative, allowing for lack of uniformity, I would allow a factor of 2 margin of error. That makes my initial estimate 5 thousand people in that first block. The blocks don’t appear to be the same length, the first one being about 100 m long, but it is easy to see that a 20 block stretch would put the numbers in the 100,000 range.
When I got home I downloaded aerial photographs of Market Street from http://mapserver.maptech.com. Based on the images Market Street is about 34 m across and the parade route was 2.7 km long. This put the total area of the parade route, not counting the square at Civic Center, at 92,000 square meters. For comparison, the first block was about 100 m long, so its area was 3400 sq.m. If we use the 5000 people per block estimate of the crowd density, that makes it about 1.5 people per square meter. If you place a bunch of people 1 m apart you will see this is fairly loose packing, so 1.5 per sq.m is not very far off. Once we got walking the spacing increased somewhat, but not by much. The moving crowd was almost stationary much of the time. It took us about 3 hours to amble a mile and a half.
Using that density for the parade route, not counting the square at the civic center, the count would be 138,000, which I would round down to 100,000, again just to be conservative. The kicker is that when we arrived at the civic center there was an announcement that the end of the parade was back where we had started! In other words we filled the parade route twice. 200,000 people is not at all out of line.
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