Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

Furthermore, the slope of the straight line, which is the exponent of the power law, is about 0.85, a little bit higher than the 0.75 (the famous ¾) we saw for the metabolic rate of organisms (Figure 1). Equally intriguing is that this exponent takes on approximately the same value for how gasoline stations scale across all of the countries shown in the figure. This value of around 0.85 is smaller than 1, so in the language developed earlier, the scaling is sublinear, indicating a systematic economy of scale, meaning that the bigger the city the fewer the number of gas stations needed on a per capita basis.