Overhead photo link list for those who want PROOF of the rally size. Please distribute. : Indybay

Photo links proof. 200,000 at San Francisco rally Jan 18 2003. Peace march was huge.

Overhead photo link list for those who want PROOF of the rally size. Please distribute widely.

January 18 2003 San Francisco peace rally of 200,000 people.

A link is needed to the updated San Francisco Police Department estimate of the crowd size. They were last up to 150,000 people.

Pages with overhead rally PHOTOS from helicopter! Also, parade route maps, aerial maps, street maps, and comments and calculations about rally size.

The 6 helicopter photos are posted together at these 3 locations:
http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/01/1562069.php --Full-size. Peter Maiden's original post. Many comments.
http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/thread.shtml?1x45328x0 --Full-size
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=229495 --Page of thumbnails linked to full-size individual photo pages.

Full parade route aerial map. Around 250 kilobytes.
http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/politics/media/45/45356.jpg --Map by itself. Narrow.
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/route.jpg ----Map by itself. Narrow.
http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/01/1563083.php --Map and article explaining it.

Copy of Jan 20 2003 Indymedia.org homepage with many great worldwide rally links and photos.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cannabisaction/message/666 This message kills the corporate media disinfo Beast!

About the 6 helicopter photos. The march STARTED at the end of Market Street near the waterfront and Justin Herman Plaza. From there people walked the long 2.7 kilometer Market Street march route. On the first photo one can see the curved building at the corner of 7th and Market Street where people turned off Market Street to walk the last few blocks to ARRIVE at the Civic Center Plaza. You can see the curved building on the 6th photo, too. The Civic Center Plaza is visible in the first 4 photos. An excerpt from the top of Peter Maiden's original post of the 6 helicopter photos: "...It was shoulder to shoulder in the Civic Center and back nearly to the foot of Market Street."

Simple street map of 2 mile march route. 42 kilobytes. The red star on the map is at 7th and Market Street, San Francisco, California. The map is from MapQuest.com
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/street_map.gif and
http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/politics/media/45/45426.gif

street_map.gif, GIF image, 499x500

----------------

A comment added to the original San Francisco Indymedia overhead helicopter photos page. Comment comes with the parade route map posted with it:
http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/01/1562069_comment.php#1563018 --Narrow parade route map

An independent count
by David Chandler • Monday January 20, 2003 at 06:52 AM

I teach physics and math, so 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 an hour and a half before we started to move.

My estimate of the stationary crowd density was 500 people for 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.

With numbers like these, news reports of "10's of thousands" (CBS, SF Chronicle, etc.) come across as pretty blatant counter-movement propaganda, especially considering that the news agencies had helicopters. Reports that ranged from 100,000-250,000 (which I understand included some of the major media outlets) seem to be honest efforts, but I would go with numbers in the 200,000 range myself.

The numbers were only one piece of the picture. The major contribution of the rally was bringing the West Coast branch of the peace movement together in a very positive, upbeat atmosphere. It was very uplifting. On the other hand, we apparently live in a time when many of those who would like to rule in our name don't count bodies any better than they count votes.

----end of David Chandler's Indymedia photo page comment----

-----------------

Another comment added to the original San Francisco Indymedia overhead photos page:
http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/01/1562069_comment.php#1562374

The pics prove my own numbers to me...
by Jim Severdia • Sunday January 19, 2003 at 07:00 PM
nvmtnman@yahoo.com

I agree with the estimates of this writer [125,000+] --as minimums. The mainstream media has it way too low...

The march began at 12:10 PM at around 6th and Taylor--where I stationed myself to watch the procession pass--not trusting the media to come up with any real numbers. The march participants at that point stretched all the way back to the foot of Market Street--a distance of about 6300 feet--and that did not include the people in and around Justin Herman Plaza, the side streets and those who went direct to Civic Center.
It is not unreasonable, given the width of Market Street to assume that, on average (the street was packed!) 15 people abreast were waiting to walk to the route. Assuming also that the loose "rows" of people were spaced about 2 feet apart, then simple arithmetic says that 15 X 3150 or 47250 people were there waiting alone to march.
However, in addition to that mental number, I stood at the starting point and allowed the entire march to pass, periodically estimating the flow by me, in people per minute, to arrive at an estimate of 68,000 - 88,000 people who passed by me! The march took 2 hours and thirty minutes to pass. The first 80 minutes seemed fairly uniform, allowing me to refine my initial estimates of people per minute passing me by to 400-600 ppm. Then for twenty minutes, the march picked up a little speed, as well as stretching almost unbroken across all of Market Street, plus one sidewalk--for that 20 minutes it seemed almost a continuous tight 30 people wide--as opposed to the nearer to 15-20 wide average when it was confined to the 4 lanes of the street.
I felt that I now had a good grasp of the estimating of the numbers and for the next 50 minutes my every 10 minute sample gave rates of 600, then 400, then 300, 400, and 300ppm.
This produces the numbers of 68K - 88K as the number who *passed by me*. It does not include the numbers who may have been on side streets paralleling the march, nor the ones who went direct to Civic Center--and at least one account indicates Civic Center as being half full before the march began--a number I will attribute to be from 10,000 - 30,000. Another person said to me that the Center was full half an hour after the march started arriving (30 minutes @ the 400-600ppm initial passing rate is 12,000 to 18,000 people) which also explains why the end of the march found it so difficult to enter the Center from McCallister, when it finally arrived at 3:00PM. People were left half a block out on the sidestreets such as Larkin and Hyde, unable to reach the Center, until the earlier masses had begun to filter away.
Civic Center and its adjacent streets form a rectangular box 600 x 750 feet in dimension. 450,000 square feet. Assuming a density of one person per square yard, and three for every two yards *minimum* is more likely from the pics--the numbers would be 50-75,000 in the Center alone...
Who is the media really reporting for...hmm?

----end of comment----

--------------

Short excerpt from another comment:
http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/01/1562069_comment.php#1562585

Jan. 18 demonstration
by Barbara • Monday January 20, 2003 at 12:52 AM

... To offer another measure of the size of the crowd: I was at the Embarcadero and in the line of march for almost four hours before reaching the Civic Center, and people continued arriving for about half an hour after that. ...

----end of comment excerpt----

--------------

Please distribute widely.

-----------------

----------

Here are direct links below to the 6 photos.

First photo was labeled:
cityhall_26skyline.jpg, JPG image, 360x546
URL: http://www.indybay.org/uploads/cityhall_26skyline.jpg
URL: http://images.indymedia.org/imc/mayday/cityhall_26skyline.jpg
URL: http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/politics/media/45/45328.jpg

Second photo was labeled:
cityhall.jpg, JPG image, 539x360
URL: http://www.indybay.org/uploads/cityhall.jpg
URL: http://images.indymedia.org/imc/mayday/cityhall.jpg
URL: http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/politics/media/45/45330.jpg

3rd photo was labeled:
cityhallangle.jpg, JPG image, 550x360
URL: http://www.indybay.org/uploads/cityhallangle.jpg
URL: http://images.indymedia.org/imc/mayday/cityhallangle.jpg
URL: http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/politics/media/45/45332.jpg

4th photo was labeled:
crowdspilling.jpg, JPG image, 550x360
URL: http://www.indybay.org/uploads/crowdspilling.jpg
URL: http://images.indymedia.org/imc/mayday/crowdspilling.jpg
URL: http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/politics/media/45/45333.jpg

5th photo was labeled:
marketclose.jpg, JPG image, 360x546
URL: http://www.indybay.org/uploads/marketclose.jpg
URL: http://images.indymedia.org/imc/mayday/marketclose.jpg
URL: http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/politics/media/45/45334.jpg

6th photo was labeled:
marketstreet.jpgd65088.jpg, JPG image, 360x544
URL: http://www.indybay.org/uploads/marketstreet.jpgd65088.jpg
URL: http://images.indymedia.org/imc/mayday/marketstreet.jpg
URL: http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/politics/media/45/45336.jpg