According to NZHerald, 300,000 people watched the Santa Parade

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Regs

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Snowflake

#410636 29-Nov-2010 11:51

NonprayingMantis:
Regs: it took me 35 minutes to get out of the sky city carpark at 5.30pm today... even after having early dinner first. there were definately a lot of people in town. we were on albert st, not queen street, and it was at least 5 deep with people on both sides of the road, plus heaps walking past.

but even so, 300,000?

auckland's population is only something like 1.3m, which means around 1/4 of the population went to the parade.

i wasnt arguing that the 300,000 was likely... it seems unlikely to me too. just that there were a shedload of people still leaving at 5.30pm

btw, auckland's population was around 1.3m in the 2006 census... its likely to have grown somewhat since then :)

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nickd

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#410693 29-Nov-2010 13:42

And news papers like zeroes, so they probably rounded it from anything above 250,000 to 300,000. +/- 50k never made any difference to anyone :-P

SpookyAwol

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#410699 29-Nov-2010 14:03

I took my kids to my last one 2 years ago and its certainly amazing how many people they can cram in - it does sound a high number though. I guess when you imagine 5 or 6 U2 concerts and spread the people out over that distance its feasible. If anything it makes for sensationalist reporting.

I did come away disappointed though which is why I didnt go back. There were too many aisian floats (nothing personal) but they seemed to be pushing a political agenda too much. My childhood memories of santa parades were about tv and movie characters, culminating in Santa's float. My kids just didnt get that satisfaction (and it should be all about the kids?) The local small town ones seem to have more character.

nate

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#410738 29-Nov-2010 15:50

SpookyAwol: The local small town ones seem to have more character.

If you get a chance, head over to Waiheke and watch their one.

Partner and I did it some years back; spent the day swimming, watched the parade, then sat in their quirky movie theatre to finish off the evening.

nickd

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#410777 29-Nov-2010 17:11

@nate: New Lynn isn't too bad either. We still throw lollies out even though we aren't allowed to.

NonprayingMantis

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#415438 10-Dec-2010 10:57

Update:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10693318

and
http://ddnum.com/articles/santaparade.php

I knew it!

"The first observation is that there simply isn’t enough room on the parade route to squeeze in 300,000 people.
The parade route is 2270 metres long and Queen and Albert Streets have a width of 26m including the footpaths. Customs Street is a bit wider at 33m.

Multiplying those numbers together and adjusting for Customs Street gives us 60,000 square metres maximum road and footpath area to fit people. But you still have to fit in the parade itself.

The distance between the blue limit lines varies but it averages about 60 percent of the total road width. That leaves us with a maximum people area of 24,000 square metres.

To fit 300,000 people into this space they would have to be squished in at a rate of 12.5 people per square metre. That’s virtually impossible.

If you draw a square on the floor one metre by one metre and get 12 and a half volunteers you will see that even four people in the area is pretty uncomfortable."

"We took photos of the crowd along the route – not to count every person individually but to obtain estimates of the people density at various points. The idea was to estimate the crowd density by counting the number in a five metre length of road. Dividing this number by five gives us the number of people per metre. We counted both sides separately since people were more numerous on the shady side of the streets.

This work can be automated by computer using scientific concepts such as “fractal dimension” to turn images of people into “Minkowski sausages.” We had just 28 photos so we did it using our own brains.

Four sample photos are shown. For each photo the caption gives the estimated number of people per metre on just the far side of the road."

Our estimates of people per metre of road range from 17 on Queen Street and 24 on Customs Street, down to zero on parts of Albert Street and Mayoral Drive. The average was 13.4. Multiply this by the parade length of 2270 metres and we get around 30,000 people.

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