News

Ask Matt ... what's going in old Harris-Teeter

Planet Fitness will open in the old Harris Teeter space on Spartanburg Highway at Chadwick Avenue.

By Matt Matteson, Published: October 12, 2016

Q. I see that there is some activity in the old Harris Teeter building on Spartanburg Highway. What’s going on?

Good news for anyone who needs a workout — Planet Fitness in moving in. The membership exercise studio is scheduled to open in early December. Planet Fitness has 1,000 locations and the closest is in Greenville, S.C. The company boasts membership starting at $10 a month. The fitness club will use only 22,000 square feet of the former Harris Teeter space. The shopping center owner will wall off a smaller area and lease it to a future tenant.

Q. How did they come up with the number 285,000 for the crowd at this year’s Apple Festival?

I tossed this question to David Nicholson, the Festival’s Executive Director who was quick to say, “285,000 is an estimate because unlike gated entry events, you can enter the downtown street fair 20 different ways.” The crowd count is based on the Jacobs Method, a commonly accepted technique where the number in one block is estimated and then multiplied by the total number of blocks. Crowd turnover must be factored as well. The Apple Festival count also includes those persons off the streets hiding out inside the downtown stores and restaurants — or bathrooms. “We had 35,000 alone that visited the Visitors Center to use our facilities,” said Beth Cardin with the Tourism Development Authority. “This year’s four-day Apple Festival was probably our biggest weekend crowd yet.”
Crowd estimates can often be controversial. Many may remember the 1995 Million Man March that gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The march organizers estimated the crowd at over 1.5 million but the National Park Police put the number at 400,000. Unhappy with the low number, Louis Farrakhan who was the head organizer of the march, threatened to sue. Congress later ordered the Park Police to stop releasing crowd size estimates to avoid controversy. So what was the real count of the Million Man March? Using a grid system and density factors, experts at Boston University put the total at 837,214 with a 20% margin of error. That’s a huge margin.
There are new methods of crowd counting using overhead digital cameras and refining the individuals down to pixels giving weight to different configurations and sizes of the “blobs” of pixels and then using algorithms to convert blobs to people. The computer counting methods work well with people in motion but often miss people who blend into the background or are in shadowed areas. Yes, a big dog could be counted as a kid, but heck, aren’t dogs people too?

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