[toast0]

San Francisco is a combined city and county (the only one in California), so its budget includes things that would be in county budgets for places like Los Angeles and San Jose.

For example, SF MTA is part of the SF budget, but LA MTA is a county agency, and isn't part of the LA city budget.

[tomjakubowski]

Seems like a fair comparison to make would be with NYC, whose city government similarly subsumes the counties/boroughs. NYC's per capita budget is about 2/3 of SF's; there may be economies of scale and other non-linear contributors at play with NYC's 10x larger population, or maybe SF is just less efficient.

edit: NYC's MTA is funded separately, including huge state contributions, so this is a terrible comparison. Let this comment be a reminder of the difficulty in comparing municipal budgets.

[albacur]

Even accounting for MTA, SF’s per-capita spending remains much higher than most other US cities. DC is the only other city that is comparable.

[refurb]

A fair comparison would be Philadelphia which is a city and county and has an airport.

Their per capita budget is half of SF's.