Crowds of a million people or more occasionally come together for huge events.

A million people in the street...

Imagine a million people demonstrating on a big city boulevard. Let’s make the road quite wide, at 100 feet. Enough room for six automobile traffic lanes and a couple of sidewalks. If you cleared the road of cars and packed it instead with people in a tight crowd, you would need more than 11 miles of roadway to hold a million people.

A million people in the park...

If you took that same million people and put them into a field, still crowded uncomfortably together, they would occupy a square about half a mile on each side.

Central Park in New York City is about half a mile wide. From the northern end of the park at 110th Street, it is about half a mile, or ten blocks, south to 101st Street. If you could remove obstacles like lakes and trees, there would be enough room to fit a crowd of a million people into that northernmost half mile of Central Park.

How tight is a tight crowd? For the calculations below and on the next page, we will pack people into a moderately dense crowd. Each person gets three feet of space left to right, and about 2 feet 4 inches front to back. The space is similar to what we allow ourselves naturally when waiting in a ticket line or watching sidewalk performers. With the crowd density described above, one million people fi t fairly neatly into a square that is half a mile long on each side.

Three hundred million people, approximately the population of the US, would require three hundred of those half-mile squares if we were to get together into a crowd. We’d need a square a little less than 9 miles on each side. A billion people? A square about 16 miles on each side. Seven billion people? A square about 42 miles per side.

If you follow a million Americans for one day, 40 babies will be born, and 23 people will die.

In 1950 (Baby Boom times) there were about 66 births per day in a population of one million Americans.

A million people in a crowd

List of largest peaceful gatherings in history - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One million typical Americans will include about:

1.   10,000 elementary and middle school teachers
   

2.    202,000 people 14 years old or younger
   

3.    2,517 hairdressers
   

4.   792 pharmacists
   

5.   1,346 clergymen or ministers
   

6.   2,739 people with the same birthday as you
   

7.   2,739 people with the same birthday as you
   

Businesses:  for each million Americans we have

1.        35 Starbucks stores
   

2.   
   

3.    
   

4. 
   

If you follow one million Americans for one week:

1.   266 babies will be born, and 154 people will die
   

2.  
   

Cars:  for each one million Americans

we have:

1.   847,000 passenger automobiles
   

2.    about 8,600 miles of paved roadway
   

3.   

passenger