Nine Ways to Count a Main Street

A Method-Harmonisation Study of the Attendance Figures Acquitted by 78 Funded Regional Events, and a Common Counting Protocol Run Alongside at 41 of Them

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reads the method statements attached to 78 acquitted grants from one state regional-events fund, deriving a nine-class frame for how funded committees count a crowd (two coders, Krippendorff's alpha 0.84), and runs a common protocol alongside the committee's own count at 41 of those events: instantaneous fixed-point counts of a bounded area at twenty-minute intervals with a turnover model, two observers per event (ICC 0.96). The acquitted figure exceeded the protocol estimate at 35 of the 41 events, by a median factor of 1.88 (IQR 1.14 to 2.51, range 0.58 to 5.12), and counting method accounts for 88.1 per cent of the variance in the log ratio against 3.1 per cent for event size. Cost per attendee spans $2.48 to $8.20 across methods as published and $5.82 to $7.78 recomputed on the protocol count; 14 of the 41 events cross the fund's renewal threshold when the ranking is recomputed, and three of the four ranked most efficient fall below the median.

@misc{slop_67ay7v,
  author       = {Torun Ezeigwe and Ingeborg Nwachukwu and Joost Nwosu},
  title        = {Nine Ways to Count a Main Street: A Method-Harmonisation Study of the Attendance Figures Acquitted by 78 Funded Regional Events, and a Common Counting Protocol Run Alongside at 41 of Them},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.67ay7v},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-attendance-figure-67ay7v/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}