Its hard to see how people will make it in this fiasco. For this number of attendees...to somehow get into the Washington region...if they used 3,000 public buses and brought in the military...it’ll still be an impossible task. Then you start with simple rules like no baby strollers? No backpacks? No thermoses (in the midst of winter)? No umbrellas?
If there is any snow at all...this will be the most miserable experience possible for folks. People who think they will watch the entire event and attempt to leave around five PM....will find that nothing is really moving...and they won’t get out of the city until 8AM the next day...and be starving unless the military hands out rations and biscuits.
If there is any terrorist action at all in DC on that day...it’ll take the public there at least twenty-four hours to get back to their car parked eight to twenty miles away. What a mess!
Jan 20 will be on a Tuesday, with the inauguration ceremony at noon. Daily commuter traffic in and out of DC is around 400-500K, so they will need to deal with six times normal commuter traffic.
They have scheduled overtime for all the mass-transit workers, and will be supplying rush-hour-level service from 4am to 7pm on the day. I don't think this will be enough.
DC will be much more of an insane zoo than usual.
This is the same list that’s been used for previous inaugurations and many DC-area events with large crowds. Also, Metro will turn off its escalators to ease the crowd flow and to minimize accidents going up and down the subway system.