Reply #59: Metro ridership was up 120,000 from a normal Saturday count

[LiberalEsto]

according to the WashPost. And that's the count up to 5 pm on Saturday, so it doesn't include many return trips. Even if 20,000 of those extra riders were going to the National Book Festival or the environmental thing, 100,000 extra riders on the Metro says a great deal about the size of the protest, because not everyone traveled by Metro.

Plenty of protesters traveled by car or bus or train or plane. Some came a day or two early, stayed with friends in DC and walked to the site of the march. Of course we would have had even more people but the Amtrak's Northeast Corridor line was closed in NJ (stranding hundreds, maybe thousands of would-be marchers from the Northeast)

Riding in on the Metro, I met people from a group of 700 that came by bus from Pittsburgh. Their buses parked at the Shady Grove Metro and they rode in on the Red Line. 700 just from Pittsburgh! And one woman in their group was from Hawaii.

I attended the Nov. 15, 1969 March on Washington protesting the Vietnam War - and the crowd there was between 500,000 and a million. I attended the anti-nuke march in Central Park, NY, another one that drew at least a half million people.

Saturday's march against the Iraq war sure looked like a half-million people to me.