Just how many people will descend on our fair city for the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States? That’s the question on everyone’s mind this week, and much like all other matters inaugural right now, no one has any friggin’ clue what the answer is.

Yesterday’s lead Metro story from the Post was about how Mayor Adrian Fenty wants to open up the National Mall to spectators, something that’s usually not done because that area is typically used for staging the parade. It’s an idea that makes a lot of sense, though, if you believe, as Fenty does, that as many as 3 or 4 million people could show up to try to get a glimpse of Obama as he heads down Pennsylvania Ave. The massive crowd projection came out of briefings conducted by federal and local officials, according to the mayor, and the enormity of what the city is facing caused the Examiner to rightly wonder whether the city could end up massively in the red due to all the extra security it will need.

Or will it? The Examiner follows up today with several federal sources, including some from the Secret Service and the FBI, who put the crowd estimate at closer to 800,000 to 1 million. That’s still an extraordinary amount of people for a presidential inauguration, but nowhere near the sort of mind-boggling figures Mayor Fenty is talking about. It is, however, roughly the same size as the crowd that showed up in 1976 for the Bicentennial “Meltdown,” which left most of those people stranded in their cars for hours, though thankfully, the city’s public transportation system has been much improved since then.

For now, President-Elect Obama has yet to formally name the President’s Inaugural Committee, which is the body that will ultimately determine the official crowd estimate for planning purposes. In other words, no one knows anything at this point.

Photo by peteetchells