Deming 用它來說明 "可運作的定時"之道理--參考 {戴明博士四日談}
台北捷運是170萬人次
底下紐約時報這篇更有新年趣聞之故事味道....
How Many in Times Sq.? Let’s Just Say, a Lot
How many people rang in the new year at Times Square on Monday night? The simple answer is: One heck of a lot. The complicated answer is: Perhaps only the Police Department knows for sure, and it won’t tell you.
A crowd of, well, thousands filled Times Square to ring in the new year.
“We have stopped providing official counts” of large public gatherings “because no one was ever satisfied with them,” said Paul J. Browne, the department’s deputy commissioner for public information. “Whatever the count was, it was usually never enough for whatever group was involved.”
That has not prevented other people, however, from estimating the number of bodies that squeeze into Times Square and its environs every New Year’s Eve.
Jeffrey A. Straus, the president of Countdown Entertainment, the company that organizes the ball drop in coordination with the Times Square Alliance, estimated that Monday night’s crowd totaled at least one million people.
“I’ve been doing this now for 13 years,” he said. “I’m in the TV truck with our cameras. We can see people from 43rd Street to Central Park on Broadway and Seventh Avenue.” Monday’s crowd was swelled by the mild weather, he said.
“People want to be together. That’s what the magic is. People want to be part of that official countdown.”
Mr. Straus said that for many years the police shared its estimates with the organizers. The last time the police provided a number was Dec. 31, 2000, he said, when the estimate was also one million people.
Other estimates in recent years have been much lower. In most years in the late 1990s, newspaper accounts tended to cite figures of around 500,000.
That is fairly consistent with the numbers issued by the Police Department when it still provided crowd estimates. A chart printed in The New York Times in 1993 showed that from 1986 to 1991, police estimates of Times Square attendance on New Year’s Eve ranged from about 300,000 to about 600,000.
The one major exception was Dec. 31, 1999, for the countdown to 2000. Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was mayor at the time, said that the crowd was “pushing two million.”
That prompted an analysis by The Times, which found reason for skepticism.
The crowd is penned behind metal barriers on Broadway and Seventh Avenue on the blocks north of 42nd Street, with a lane about 10 feet wide kept clear on the street. That means there is a fair amount of open space.
The Times calculated the total surface area on Seventh Avenue and Broadway, including the street and sidewalk, from Central Park South to 34th Street (where many people in 1999 watched the ball drop on large television screens).
Using a measurement of two square feet per person, which has long been standard in estimating crowd sizes, the analysis determined that the total capacity of the viewing area that year was approximately 430,000 people. Adding some additional capacity to account for spillover onto side streets, the analysis determined that there was room for about 700,000 people — during what was certainly the most ballyhooed celebration in the history of the Times Square event.
This year’s crowd covered less area, however, than that throng. It extended from Central Park South only to 42nd Street, along Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Mr. Browne said, with some additional crowds in Central Park and along the side streets.
Mr. Browne said that he did not know how long ago the department stopped releasing its crowd estimates for all sorts of events, from parades to protests, but that it was probably about a decade ago.
Paul Wertheimer, the president of Crowd Management Strategies, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm, said that many police agencies across the country became reluctant to reveal crowd-size estimates after the Million Man March in Washington in 1995, which was organized by the Nation of Islam. The National Park Service estimated that the march drew 400,000 people. A furor ensued when the organizers insisted the number was far larger. A year later, the park service said it would no longer make crowd estimates.
“What did in fact kind of ruin it, and frightened police agencies or those people that estimated it away, was when it became a political issue,” Mr. Wertheimer said. “The organizers can charge prejudice if they don’t get the numbers that they believe occurred.”
But he said police agencies continued to estimate the size of such crowds to help them plan for future events and to evaluate their effectiveness in handling large crowds.
The New York Police Department has at least two ways of estimating the size of a large crowd. One is to use aerial photographs taken by a helicopter flying overhead, Mr. Browne said. The police then place a grid over the photograph and count the number of people inside one section of the grid. They can then count the other sections and multiply to come up with an estimate.
The second method, used for parades or other events where people are lined up behind metal barriers on streets and sidewalks, relies on a rule of thumb of about 2,500 people per block, Mr. Browne said. That figure is meant to be a total that includes people on both sides of a street, he said.
That rule would not seem to apply to the Times Square celebration, however, partly because the barricaded areas were often larger than those for a typical parade.
Broadway and Seventh Avenue each run for 17 blocks from 42nd to 59th Streets, for a total of 34 blocks. But multiplying 34 by 2,500, using the parade formula, yields just 85,000 people, clearly a gross underestimate.
Mr. Straus, the event organizer, acknowledged that calculating the number of people packed into Times Square on New Year’s Eve can feel a little like guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar.
“It’s an art, not a science,” he said. “And at the end of the day, does it really matter? It’s a lot of people.”
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