Crowd Estimator Says 44,000 People Marched in Philly on Saturday

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Getting an estimate on the crowd for Philly’s protest march on Saturday, June 6th seems to be nearly impossible. The first estimate I saw was 8,500. According to Billy Penn, that number was given to NBC10 by Philly police.

8,500 is a ridiculous number for any Philly agency to release as an estimate. There may have been 8,500 people at the Art Museum at 10:00 a.m., a full two hours before the march. Anyone who was at the protest or saw the overhead visuals form NBC10 knows that the numbers were far greater.

If not 8,500, how big was the crowd?

Lucky for us, there is an online tool to estimate crowd sizes designed by France’s Anthony Cartel called MapChecking. I went to mapchecking.com to see what size crowd the tool would estimate for Saturday’s protest.

Here are some aerial shots from the video NBC10 tweeted out:

To calculate a crowd size estimate on MapChecking you need to mark off a geographic area and then pic the density of the crowd.

For my estimation, I tried to include only the main strip of the Parkway and stopped before the Logan Circle. Here is the area that I marked off for the estimate.

That means I did not include the side areas marked in red boxes because I could not clearly see the density of people on the peripheral lanes of the Parkway.

I stopped before the Logan Circle because the density was inconsistent with the center strip of the Parkway. So past the red line were not included in the estimate.

I then had to pick a density of the crowd in terms of people per square meter. Mapchecking.com provides links to samples of crowd density on a site by Professor G. Keith Still that focuses on Crowd Safety and Crowd Risk Analysis.

The overhead images looked denser than the sample for 1.5 people per square meter.

And, maybe not as dense as Professor’s Still’s sample of 2 people per square meter.

So, I selected 1.7 people per square meter.

How big did it estimate the crowd? 44,211.

Remember, the peripheral lanes of the Ben Franklin Parkway or the area beyond the fountain at Logan Square were not included so that is a conservative 44,211. No matter how you look at it, 44,000 to protest for Black Lives Matter is quite significant.