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Tuesday, April 23, 2002

By Donald I. Hammonds, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

There are plenty of pictures of the city and region around, but a snapshot offered yesterday by a local public policy group provided a mixed picture on how well the region is doing.

Sustainable Pittsburgh, which advocates a wide-ranging agenda aimed at sustaining the region's long-term growth and well-being, said the Pittsburgh area was doing particularly well on issues such as unemployment, Internet access and high school graduation rates, but poorly on such issues as voter participation, infant health and recycling.

The report, "Southwestern Pennsylvania Regional Indicators Report 2002," is meant to be the first in a regular update on a number of key economic, environmental and societal indicators that measure the region's performance.

For example, to gauge how Pittsburgh is doing on ecological balance, it measures the health of native species. To see how the region is doing on mobility -- getting from here to there using our roads and transit system -- it measures hours lost annually to backups and other driving delays.

The report defines a sustainable society as "one that can persist indefinitely because it thinks long term, understands the systems on which it depends, plans adequately for the future and wisely manages all of its resources."

Courtland P. Gould, director of Sustainable Pittsburgh, admits that Pittsburgh has been the target of plenty of studies already and that some people might wonder why another one is necessary. But he says the Sustainable Pittsburgh snapshot is different because instead of focusing on one or two elements -- say, housing or the economy -- as most studies do, this study looks at all interdependent elements that make up the whole of the region.

Gould also is hopeful that the report has been written to be readable and to sustain interest.

It also provides a handbook to help local neighborhoods, municipalities and others come up with their own ways of measuring their progress, and allows them to check up on their progress.

Funded by the Heinz Endowments, the R.K. Mellon Foundation and other sources, Sustainable Pittsburgh hopes that some other regional group takes on the task of doing the analysis on a regular basis or perhaps that each county in the region will do its own regular checkups. The group also has created a Web site where the public can read the report, www.sustainablepittsburgh.org/SWPAIndicators.