First, Mayor Menino of Boston announced that we should expect five million people to come downtown for the Red Sox parade. George and I wondered where they were going to come from, since Boston has less than 2 million in the whole city. Then, they announced that there were 3.5 million people there that afternoon. Everyone who thought about this looked a little askance, but no one said much. George did some calculations and figured out that was impossible.
In Monday's Boston Globe, finally someone is trying to set the record straight in the name of honest journalism. They said that "3.2 million people standing shoulder to shoulder along both sides of a 3 mile land route and along one side of a 4 mile water route would have to stand, on average, 120 deep (i.e. 120 people every 2 feet for 10 miles). If 2.7 million people entered Boston and Cambridge in a four hour period, they would have to enter at an average rate of 188 per second." Then they report, "If the parade route was 10 miles and there were 20 people every two feet, then there were 528,000 people there."
In the TV coverage, we saw people who had been waiting at Fenway Park running in crowds to the water, so they could see the team go by again. The crowds just followed the players, naturally. Did they really expect that those people would just pack up and leave? Downtown Boston is only a few blocks long and you can walk across the city easily. We also saw many young people who had a chance to stand and talk to the players at length as the duck boats waited their turn to go into the Charles River. Some people had their shirts, hats, programs, and arms signed by the players, and some young girls even had time to flirt a little.
The newspaper article also reports that there is a company called the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University who will create a same/day/estimate number of a crowd based on aerial and/or satellite images for the small fee of $3000.
Oh well. Who cares. I am not going to change my blog where I said that "millions" were there. So what. We are Red Sox Nation. We can do anything we want. We won the World Series! Woohoo!!
