Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
Roads, Transit, Fire, Police all scale with total square footage of the city to varying degrees. That covers about 60% of the city budget. These services all cost more as the city gets larger in physical size.
Some thought should be also put into an individuals collective impact into time wasting commutes.
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How much does police service scale with city size? I suspect density creates more interpersonal conflict due to extra human contact, increasing policing cost. The only thing they do that probably scales with size is traffic enforcement, but that is self funding.
Compare the City of Vancouver (population 675k) to the City of Calgary (almost exactly double population at 1.336 MM). Vancouver had a 2020 police budget of $340.6 MM. From the 3 year budget cycle document, Calgary Police had a 2020 budget of $401 MM.
The city of vancouver is way, way more dense than Calgary, and spends 66% more money per capita on police services. I think if there is any positive correlation with city land area it must be very slight, as calgary is much, much less dense than the city of vancouver. In fact Vancouver has more than 3x as many people per square km. If density was a big savings for police services they should be seeing that savings.