> It must be corruption, because surely you have people who can administer with competency comparable to my town. They probably do have people who can administ

> It must be corruption, because surely you have people who can administer with competency comparable to my town. They probably do have people who can administer with comparable competency, but I think the competency required to manage a town of 40k is very different from the kind of competency you need to get those results in a much larger town. At small city scale, administrative layers can be thin and infrequent because of the smaller scale. Changing collections to be every other week could probably be a meeting with a few dozen workers. In a major city, that could be hundreds or thousands of workers, requiring administrative layers to handle rescheduling, handling concerns, etc, etc. Small cities also generally have to develop smaller portions of their budget to dynamically adjusting to shifts in the city. How often do you have to build new roads and expand existing ones to handle shifts in traffic? What's the worst case scenario for traffic in a city of 40k, vs a city with millions of people? The major cities I've lived in are constantly having to build new roads and expand existing ones, and they're barely making a dent in the traffic problem. Stuff like taking down trees and cleaning parks is pretty easy when the town is small enough to have a half dozen people do it. You need a whole administration layer when you can't have 6 people that just wander around parks fixing things that need to be fixed. Like many things, I think complexity and cost of those services tends to scale exponentially with population rather than linearly.