Every neighbourhood statistic on this site depends on a deceptively hard question: where does one neighbourhood end and the next begin? Ask three locals where a neighbourhood ends and you'll get three answers. Statistics need one answer, so Explore uses each city's official or established boundary set.
Why fixed boundaries matter
The boundary sets used here cover their city completely, with no gaps or overlaps, and carry stable names. That stability is the whole point: it makes this month comparable to last month, one area comparable to its neighbours, and Dispatchr's numbers comparable to other datasets drawn on the same geography — planning data, census profiles, and city dashboards alike.
The boundary sets by city
- Toronto — 158 neighbourhood areas
- Nashville — 27 neighbourhood areas
- Las Vegas — 52 neighbourhood areas
- Medicine Hat — 28 neighbourhood areas
- San Francisco — 37 neighbourhood areas
- Dallas — 24 neighbourhood areas
- Cincinnati — 45 neighbourhood areas
- Chicago — 98 neighbourhood areas
- Detroit — 54 neighbourhood areas
- Vancouver — 22 neighbourhood areas
- Brampton — 70 neighbourhood areas
- Mississauga — 43 neighbourhood areas
- Vaughan — 30 neighbourhood areas
Counts reflect the boundary sets Dispatchr uses for each city — official municipal neighbourhood structures where the city publishes one, established local-area sets otherwise. Area sizes and counts vary a lot between cities, so cross-city comparisons of per-neighbourhood numbers should account for that.
Case study: Toronto’s 140 → 158
Boundary sets evolve. The City of Toronto maintained a 140-neighbourhood map for two decades before updating it in 2022 to today's 158 neighbourhoods, splitting areas that had grown too large or too internally different to describe with one number. Explore uses the current 158 structure — worth knowing if you compare against older publications built on the 140 map.
Official vs. vernacular names
Official boundaries don't always match the names on storefront banners. Some official names are compounds ("St Lawrence-East Bayfront-The Islands"); some well-known local names are folded into larger official areas; and boundary sets from different sources sometimes spell the same area two ways. The trade-off is worth it: fixed polygons make numbers comparable in a way vernacular names never can.
How calls are assigned to neighbourhoods
Each dispatched call arrives with an approximate location. Dispatchr tests that point against the boundary polygons — a call counts toward a neighbourhood only if its coordinates fall inside that neighbourhood's polygon. Calls with unreliable, generalized, or redacted coordinates are excluded from neighbourhood totals (they still count citywide), and a small share of calls land outside every polygon — waterways, port lands, boundary edges. The full rules are on the methodology page.
Reading boundary quirks
Boundary placement explains some patterns you may notice. Areas that include a highway segment inherit its collisions; areas containing a hospital inherit ambulance-adjacent activity at its doors; the neighbourhood containing a transit interchange collects activity from everyone passing through it. When a number surprises you, look at the boundary shape on the page — the explanation is often drawn right there.