It's not just gas costs. It's also the initial and maintenance cost of a patrol vehicle. Around here a lot of police use SUVs - so you're looking at $30-40k per car/SUV, maybe, what, like a tank a day? I dunno. $60-80-100? I don't own an SUV but the van I use for Bethel takes 40 gallons of gas - so $150-160 per tank at the current rate. It gets 8-12 mpg so I can drive it about 350-400 miles per tank, maybe a day of driving around all day.

On a side note - To think that in my old job I helped the futures guys do this to the oil prices. Really sucks.

Bike is, at a top end, maybe $2-3k, virtually no maintenance (tires, tubes, chain, cassette - do everything for the cost of a "tune-up" for a car/SUV), and doesn't require registration, insurance, etc (do towns pay for that too? They must.)

Of course, around here, if you try and patrol the 2-3 acre zoned areas, it'll take a while to ride around the hilly roads. My town has a bike patrol but there's virtually no good place for them to patrol on a bike. Nearby towns ditto.

In Norwalk CT the bike patrol used to be pretty intense. Our shop did the Norwalk bikes for a while (they used top end Cannondale full suspension mtbs for a while) and the owner did a "ride along" in South Norwalk on some late night patrol. Bottles tossed at him, swearing, tons of kids running around at 1 AM, crowds of people on street corners, people yelling that "hey that's the cop that ***** me", spit, garbage, the whole shebang. The cop just ignored it all, told the owner "okay, that guy there owns that corner, he's part of this gang, he sells such and such. That guy over there owns that corner"... etc etc etc. Now I think it's less so, but there are still shootings and such in the bad parts of town.

cdr