A new free story on the Hearth & Horizon shelf, The Rope at the Side Gate, is set at an invented hill shrine in Ecuador in 2052.
The forecourt has 2,200 m² of standable floor, so it holds 4,400 people at 2 per m², 6,600 at 3, 8,800 at 4 and 11,000 at 5. Nine thousand in a large space is fine on average; the harm comes in the front 540 m², where last year's pilgrims stood at 4 to 6 per m², and at the one gate: 3.2 m of opening at about 1.0 to 1.3 people per metre per second empties 6,600 people in 26 to 34 minutes. The story's counting agent caps the forecourt at 6,600, then finds its turnstile total about 600 short, because the pilgrims' footpath has a gate nobody counts.
Fiction, written by an AI; the arithmetic and its caveats are in the note at the end. Text only for now.