First picture: The line inside the parking garage.
Second picture: AFter standing in line half an hour, looking back toward the parking garage.
Third picture: Standing in that exact same spot, except moved to the other side of the sidewalk and pointing the camera in the opposite direction, to show how much farther we have to go to get to the overpass across the freeway and into the metro station. And this is only ONE of the FOUR LINES that were going into that metro station.
My Adventure getting on the train
On Thursday I was invited by Anne and Frank G. to travel to Washington D.C. to go to the Glenn Beck rally. Victoria K. and her two daughters Jessica and Mikayla also came. We left Friday, spent the night in Oak Hill, VA (not Herndon as I had written here previously), and left at 7 a.m. for what should have been a 15 minute drive to the Vienna VA metro station.
Wow, were we wrong! Traffic was horrendous! We saw so many cars with conservative bumper stickers, etc. that made us suspect that much of the traffic jam was made up of people going to the rally. And on that road, we were all converging on the Vienna metro station.
When we finally got into the parking areas, vehicles were parked in every conceivable illegal area, on the grass, and we worried the parking was all gone. Someone directed us to a farther multi-level parking lot, and we got a parking spot, and started standing in line at 8:15 am. We stood in that line until 11:30, when we finally got on the train and took the 30 minute train ride to the Smithsonian subway stop. We arrived at 12 noon, two hours late for the event which ran from 10 am- 1 pm.
Note: On our side of the freeway, there were two similar lines coming from two different directions converging on the overpass across the freeway. We did not know until we got inside the building that there were another two lines coming from the other side of the building. So what you are seeing in my pictures is only one line out of the four lines waiting at that subway station.
(And please note, we saw the Al Sharpton march when it marched past us after the Glenn Beck rally, their group was not as big as ONE of these lines. So don't believe it if you read it was huge. It wasn't.)
There are lots of different estimates of the size of the crowd at the rally.
If you look at these pictures of the Vienna metro station, I am thinking there were at least 2500 people in each of the 4 lines leading into the station in these pictures. And then you have to count the people that were in the lines before we got there at 8:15 am, and the people that kept coming after we got on the trains (because there were still lines behind us.)
There had to be 10,000 people at one time, so if you times that by at least two (because at the very minimum the line replaced itself every 2 hours) there were 20,000 who got on the trains from that station alone.
In the article below, this guy has the right idea (and pictures of that same Vienna metro station, PLUS pictures of how crowded the trains were which we had to ride.) His estimate of attendees is more than 1.5 million, with another half a million who couldn’t get there, and I have to agree with him.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/08/was_the_restoring_honor_rally.html
The point of this is that DC is only capable of accommodating a finite number of people within any single day, and that maximum was attained on 8-28. My estimate is that at least one-third of the people waiting in the Metro station lines and stranded on the highways could not have made it there by 1:30 pm when the event ended. If the maximum number of attendees possible at a DC rally is about 1.5 million, then there were that many at the Beck rally and perhaps another half million who tried to attend but failed. My estimate might be flawed, but there is no way to accurately determine how many people may have attended the event if they had better access to the city.
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