I was just enjoying the sunshine in Midtown next to the lions of the NYPL, and the thought occurred. Lot of suburbanites, outer-boroughs people, people passing through…
Fridays or days before national holidays don’t count.
Funny you should ask this, because just this morning I was wasting time at work and read this interesting paper (PDF) from the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management.
Wow! Talk about serendipity!
What a fantastic paper. Manhattan doubles to 3 million every workday, including tourists, and commuters (Arlington nearly doubles as a commuter city, but it’s Arlington.)
Midtown and Financial Districts in daytime have almost 1 million people per square mile. That’s spooky.
Oh yeah, throw in a Giants parade or Macy’s Thanksgiving parade downtown and add another 1 million.
How many people at 2:00pm? A whole bunch, boy I tell you what.
Went to New York City one time. The traffic and horn blowing seemed to be the same whether it was midnight or 12 o’clock noon.
Went outside the lobby and choked down a deep breath of atmosphere and thought, “Boy! They really are right! The city that never sleeps.”
This was in the afternoon, when any self-respecting Southerner is taking a nap.
FWIW I read some time ago that San Francisco’s day time population is about double it’s residential population also. I wonder if this holds true for most major cities and does any city exceed that?
The City of London, with an area of a bit over 1 square mile, “has a resident population of about 7,000 (Census, 2011) but around 316,700 people work there”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London). That figure does not include the thousands of tourists who visit every day, or the other thousands passing through each day.
Isaac Asimov has written an essay (I have no idea about its name or where it can be found) about what might be the World’s most densely populated place and he came to the conclusion that it must be Manhattan on a normal work day.
A well travelled American mate, was totally gobsmacked at the number of people (tourists) outside of Buckingham Palace, even though the Windsors were not in residence at that time.
He was even more gobsmacked when told that there was no special event being held there.
My understanding is that Shanghai during the holidays in China is one of the most populated cities in the world, almost tripling its residential population.
That ratio might be exaggerated a bit, because I understood that the City is nearly all a business district, with very little in the way of residential housing. So it’s easy to get a 45-to-1 ratio when you start out small enough.
The Pentagon is about ¼ square mile, and has about 31,000 daily occupants, but hardly any ‘residents’. So it would probably have an even higher ratio.