Obama's inauguration by the numbers
Reuters | 01/20/2009 7:44 PM
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U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's historic inauguration in Washington on Tuesday means crunching a lot of numbers. Here is a snapshot of some of them:
* 5,000: The number of portable toilets to be distributed on the National Mall.
* 10,000: The number of buses that city transportation and Secret Service officials expect to ferry people to Washington. Placed end to end, the buses would stretch 85 miles.
* 240,000: That is how many tickets have been distributed, free of charge, for the swearing-in ceremony on Capitol Hill.
* 32: The chilly daily high temperature, in degrees Fahrenheit, forecast for Tuesday. That is zero degrees Celsius.
* 55: The number of previous presidential inaugurations.
* 1 million: The number of people expected to view the inauguration from the National Mall. Hundreds of thousands more will pack Pennsylvania Avenue to watch the inaugural parade. The record was set during the 1965 inauguration of Lyndon B. Johnson, when 1.2 million people attended.
* $8,249: The price of a seat at the swearing-in ceremony being advertised by one online ticket broker.
* 850: Washington's Metro rail service says it will have that many rail cars, capable of carrying 120,000 people every hour, operating between 4 a.m. and 9 p.m on the day.
* 8,000: Some 4,000 city police officers will be deployed along with 4,000 from 96 other law enforcement agencies across the country.
* 32,000: The total number of military personnel who will be on duty or on standby for the inauguration.
* 900: The number of hotel rooms still available in the city.
