1 million people at the Rose Parade?

For years, the city, the Rose parade staff and others have pushed figures of 1 million people showing up to the Rose Parade (or near that). Many years ago, this newspaper presented a mathematical analysis that cast doubt on that figure. I think we ought to republish it, since the figure is still being pushed. Since I was just a wee child when this figure was first debunked, I am deferring to Larry Wilson to explain the details. This writing is from his comments on an LAObserved post about the 2003 parade:

Sorry to have to set everyone straight here, but such is the lot of the editor of the Pasadena Star-News: me. A) Irreverent or not, it was not an L.A. Times science writer pressed into parade duty -- having been a Times copy boy, that is not a remotely possible real-life situation, by the way -- who noted the impossibility of 1 million people at the Rose Parade. It was a Pasadena Star-News reporter, John Fleck, who in the late 1980s roped my stepfather, Al Hibbs, a Caltech/JPL mathematician and physicist, into doing the very simple arithmetic that proves that really no more than 400,000 people can fit along the parade route. (I was the editorial-page editor at the time and had nothing to do with the actual assignment.) Perhaps the source of the myth about the Times is that Al's casual theory that there was no way 1 million people attend the parade was first mentioned in his friend Jack Smith's column in the Times. But when John pressed Al to actually produce the math for a front-page story in the Star-News, they collaborated, adding up all the people who buy tickets in the grandstands, then giving a VERY generous allowance of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder 10 deep along both sides of the 5.5 mile route, then adding in an even more generous extra 100,000 people who might be watching from office buildings etc. along Colorado Boulevard to get to the 500,000 spectators figure. Silly as it is, disproved as it is, the Tournament of Roses still uses the 1 million estimate in its press releases for this coming year's parade. There is no ''party line'' about a million coming to the area: the press release, citing ''law enforcement estimates,'' says 1 million attend the parade itself. The Pasadena Police Department says it has no such estimater; all the same, its spokesman last year came up with the ludicrously detailed figure of 952,000 attendees when our reporter asked for a crowd count last Jan. 1 for our annual Rose Parade special edition, published this and every year on Jan. 2. As to the post that there used to be editors at the Pasadena Star-News who also disputed the figure, well, this is to show that the editor still very much disputes it, as recently as my column of this past Sunday, Dec. 14. You could look it up: www.pasadenastarnews.com. All best wishes, Larry Wilson, editor, Pasadena Star-News