Local
Inauguration crowds will test D.C.’s transit, lodging capacities
By: Leah Fabel
Examiner Staff Writer
November 21, 2008
Federal officials have called D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty’s estimates of as many as 5 million attendees for Barack Obama’s inauguration an exaggeration in part because of their experience with massive crowds in the city before.
Veterans of major city events from agencies such as the Secret Service, Park Police and the FBI are expecting about 1 million people to descend on Washington. Fenty, though, has claimed that one in every 60 Americans may be in the District to see Obama on Jan. 20.
Part of what limits crowd size on the Mall is the means for getting people there.
In 1976, 1 million visitors for the nation’s bicentennial festivities clogged the subway-less region’s roadways and bus system. News reports said cars and pedestrians choked major arteries from 11 p.m. until 3 a.m. Metro buses, which transported thousands of people into the city throughout the day, collapsed in efforts to return them home.
Then there’s the issue of where to put the visitors. Hotels are already booked as far away as Richmond and Philadelphia, and there are only so many residents who will give up their homes for Obama fans.
Fenty announced Thursday the city would suspend the business license for short-term rental property from Jan. 13 until Jan. 27 in acknowledgment of the thousands of residents hoping to cash in on record-breaking attendance.
The record to be broken is 1.2 million, last seen for the 1965 swearing-in of President Lyndon Johnson.
“The traffic, the crowds, the merrymaking and confusion all seemed to fit the Texas-sized prescription for this Inauguration jamboree — bigger, flashier, and costlier than ever,” said the Washington Post’s sunny report of the day’s events.
David Barna, spokesman for the National Park Service, said his agency has to be prepared for Johnson’s record to fall — possibly by a large margin.
The ticketed portion of Obama’s inauguration will be held on the west side of the U.S. Capitol. The nonticketed areas have traditionally stretched to Seventh Street Northwest, Barna said, but may extend to 14th Street Northwest to accommodate an additional 330,000 people. The maximum estimated capacity for the Mall is about 2.5 million people when stretched to the Lincoln Memorial, he said.
And if the crowd stretches that far, they can look up and imagine President Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861, when the country verged on a civil war and The New York Times reported a inaugural eve crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue “roaming about the streets, carpetbags in hand, seeking some place to ‘put up.’ ”
Veterans of major city events from agencies such as the Secret Service, Park Police and the FBI are expecting about 1 million people to descend on Washington. Fenty, though, has claimed that one in every 60 Americans may be in the District to see Obama on Jan. 20.
Part of what limits crowd size on the Mall is the means for getting people there.
In 1976, 1 million visitors for the nation’s bicentennial festivities clogged the subway-less region’s roadways and bus system. News reports said cars and pedestrians choked major arteries from 11 p.m. until 3 a.m. Metro buses, which transported thousands of people into the city throughout the day, collapsed in efforts to return them home.
Then there’s the issue of where to put the visitors. Hotels are already booked as far away as Richmond and Philadelphia, and there are only so many residents who will give up their homes for Obama fans.
Fenty announced Thursday the city would suspend the business license for short-term rental property from Jan. 13 until Jan. 27 in acknowledgment of the thousands of residents hoping to cash in on record-breaking attendance.
The record to be broken is 1.2 million, last seen for the 1965 swearing-in of President Lyndon Johnson.
“The traffic, the crowds, the merrymaking and confusion all seemed to fit the Texas-sized prescription for this Inauguration jamboree — bigger, flashier, and costlier than ever,” said the Washington Post’s sunny report of the day’s events.
David Barna, spokesman for the National Park Service, said his agency has to be prepared for Johnson’s record to fall — possibly by a large margin.
The ticketed portion of Obama’s inauguration will be held on the west side of the U.S. Capitol. The nonticketed areas have traditionally stretched to Seventh Street Northwest, Barna said, but may extend to 14th Street Northwest to accommodate an additional 330,000 people. The maximum estimated capacity for the Mall is about 2.5 million people when stretched to the Lincoln Memorial, he said.
And if the crowd stretches that far, they can look up and imagine President Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861, when the country verged on a civil war and The New York Times reported a inaugural eve crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue “roaming about the streets, carpetbags in hand, seeking some place to ‘put up.’ ”
