Technician-to-Vehicle Ratio

The raw ratio, assets divided by technicians, is the number most often quoted in a budget hearing and the one most often quoted wrongly. A patrol car and a fire apparatus are not one asset each. A fleet of sedans and a fleet of refuse packers with the same headcount ratio are not comparably staffed, and comparing them without adjusting is how a fleet gets told it is overstaffed.

The usual correction is to weight assets by the maintenance they actually demand, so that a heavy or complex unit counts as several light ones. Whatever the weighting scheme is called locally, the principle is the same: staff against work, not against unit count.

Two further things move the number and are often left out of the comparison. How much work is outsourced, since a fleet sending transmissions out needs fewer hours in house. And what else the technicians do, because a shop whose staff also run fueling, motor pool or snow standby is not putting those hours on vehicles.

MPF publishes a calculator for this, which does the weighting rather than leaving it to argument.