The city has hired more than 4,000 extra officers to help during the Inauguration, said Feras Sleiman, spokesman for the Executive Office of the Mayor of Washington, D.C., in an e-mail.

But despite the road closures and large amounts of people, normal services for residents, such as trash and recycling pick-up, will not be altered the week of the Inauguration, he said.

The reason for all the preparations and security is because President-elect Obama is committed to making this Inauguration the most open in history, said Shin Inouye, a spokeswoman for the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

Yoshikawa, who works at Washington Core, a consulting and research firm in Bethesda, Md., said she thinks most of the Inauguration crowd is going to be people from out of town.

“Most of my colleagues won’t go to the Inauguration, because it’s going to be so crazy,” she said.

Tim Kirby, a 2006 MSU alum who lives in Washington, D.C., said he hasn’t decided if he’ll attend the Inauguration yet.

“My guess would be that people who live in district are less inclined to attend the Inauguration, because they didn’t have to do anything special to be part of this,” he said.

Although many travelers arrived on Saturday, the crowds did not explode until Sunday, Kirby said.

“There were hordes of people getting off the metro,” he said. “They didn’t even have to pay to get off, it was too big of a crowd.”

Zoology senior Cara Callison said although traffic was bad, it wasn’t as bad as she was expecting it to be. Callison arrived in D.C. on Sunday afternoon.

“I was expecting to be waiting for hours, but it didn’t take me long to get into the city at all,” she said. “I’m glad that people are more laid back than I was expecting them to be.”

In addition to accumulating more people, the city has been building scaffolding and bleachers in front of the White House, which became completely blocked off on Saturday, Kirby said.