We have been at work for the past three years on an ambitious project: regional indicators that give citizens and policy-makers alike the solid information they need to make sound decisions.

The results of this ongoing effort can be seen in detail on www.pittsburghtoday.org. At this writing, there are 255 separate indicators being published on the site, with another 52 in the final stages of development.

I never cease to be surprised by what a rigorous examination of the facts can reveal. Here are summaries of 10 of the more eye-opening indicators.

Expensive local government? Think again

Pittsburgh does not spend much money per capita on local government compared with other the regions of the nation.

The U.S. Bureau of Census reports per capita spending for local government by region (Metropolitan Statistical Area). Revenues raised by local school districts, municipalities, special government districts and counties constitute the total. State and federal dollars are not included. Expenditures for police and fire in the seven-county Pittsburgh region are lower than any other region; spending on parks and recreation is second from the bottom for benchmark regions.

All other key expenditures as well as taxes and revenues per capita are also below the benchmark average -- with one conspicuous exception: per capita interest on debt. At $352 per capita in 2002 (the latest number), the Pittsburgh region led the field, finishing well ahead of the runner-up, Denver ($311 in per capita spending on local debt).

Our so-called traffic jams are relative cakewalks

When you are waiting in a line of cars to get through the Squirrel Tunnel twice a day, you are convinced that commuting could not be worse anywhere else in nation. You should resist the temptation to so assume, however, because reality is quite different.

The Texas Transportation Institute's Urban Mobility Report finds Pittsburgh to be one of the least congested of any the nation's major cities. Figures on average annual delay in hours on major arterial roads during commuting hours are available from 1999 to 2005. Only Cleveland (13 hours) has a better number than Pittsburgh (16) among benchmark cities (average of 36 hours).

Some bad roads, yes. But we travel 'good' and 'excellent' ones too

Another relevant indicator is what the average motorist pays in additional costs each year to operate a motor vehicle because of road conditions. If you look at Pittsburgh Today's indicators on highway quality, you'll see that the Pittsburgh region is below average when it comes to smooth roads.

But the consequences of our bad roads are apparently offset by the quality of our good and excellent roads. In 2006 a resident of the Pittsburgh region paid $396 extra per year in maintenance costs because of road conditions. That was below the benchmark city average ($429 in additional annual costs) and at the mean (Charlotte $182) and (Kansas City $651).

The bedsore factor: attention must be paid

The availability of data is a key factor in indicator development and there are many things one would like to know about but cannot because information is not accessible. This is not the case with nursing home care, where data abound because of close government oversight. RAND Corp., one of the nation's premier research organizations and a new and valued part of Pittsburgh, used that data to produce some of the first work published by the Regional Indicators Project, a cluster of health indicators that concentrated on the quality of elderly health care.

Pittsburgh does not fare well in this area; it is slightly below the benchmark average on pressure sores for high risk patients (18.46 percent of patients).

But it is worse than all but one benchmark city in the level of pressure sores among its low-risk nursing home patients (6.6 percent) and it is second from the bottom when it comes to the use of restraints (7.8 percent compared to a benchmark average of 5.3 percent). I have been struck by the lack of reaction by the public to this information.

The anxiety of job loss -- we've got plenty of company

The first subject Pittsburgh Today emphasized when it went public 18 months ago was jobs. How was Pittsburgh doing at creating jobs?

As most people know, the story the data have been telling since then has been discouraging. In 2000 there were 1,147,000 jobs in Pittsburgh; in 2006 there were 1,137,400, a decline of just under 10,000 jobs. During the same period, the nation added 4,882,650 jobs, an increase of 3.7 percent.

There was some solace in the fact that Pittsburgh's situation was not unique. The 15 regions against which Pittsburgh benchmarks itself averaged 3,000 fewer jobs in 2006 than they did in 2000. This was because the job losses during that period -- Detroit (203,000), Boston (85,000), Cleveland (40,000), Milwaukee (21,000) and Pittsburgh (9,600) -- more than wiped out the gains recorded by Baltimore, Cincinnati, Charlotte, Denver, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Richmond and St. Louis.

Unemployment figures: not where the jobs are

The latest economic indicator featured on the site is the unemployment rate. Pittsburgh's rate is 4.9 percent, in 2000 it was 4.8. The number is derived by dividing the number of people looking for work (58,000) by the total labor force (1,204,000).

What is not generally understood is that the number of people working does not equal the total number of jobs: 1,145,722 people working in Pittsburgh in 2006, compared to 1,137,400 jobs in the same year. Employment measures the number of people who live in region and are working even if their job is outside the region; jobs are measured only within the region regardless of whether or not the people filling them are residents of the region.

The fact that there was a slight increase in the number of people working in the region last year compared with eight years ago (6,203) must be tempered by reality. In four of the past 10 years, there were more Pittsburghers working than is the case today.

Real estate fever: why we don't have a headache

The housing market is Topic A in the United States today as the result of a collapse of prices in the South and West and, with that collapse, huge mortgage default rates. This has not been a problem in the Pittsburgh region because real estate prices here have been increasing steadily but slowly for the last 10 years -- 54 percent compared with the national rate of 101 percent.

Only four of the benchmark cities with which we compare ourselves have also seen prices increase during the decade at a slower rate than Pittsburgh -- Indianapolis, Detroit, Cleveland and Cincinnati -- but in recent years the region's relative position has been steadily improving.

As of the third quarter of 2007 only Charlotte (8 percent annual appreciation rate) and Richmond (6 percent) were outpacing Pittsburgh in the rate at which residential real estate values were going up (5 percent).

The 'graying' of culture vultures? Not so fast

Several weeks ago this newspaper had a front page story based on a report from a national outfit, Americans for the Arts, that noted increasing concern about an ever-older arts audience in Pittsburgh, with the "average age" approaching 55. It raised the hair on the back of my neck because it was exactly the sort of story that the indicator project is designed to help people deal with, i.e. treat with caution any national trend story that aggregates a great deal of data.

If you visit Pittsburgh Today's arts indicators, you will find both more current data (end of 2006) and precise data (eight different audience ages) than that supplied by the Americans for the Arts. They make clear that the regional audiences for classical music are disproportionately older than the audience for museums to cite two extremes, but overall -- and more on point -- the percentage of the total potential audience that Pittsburgh arts organizations are attracting regardless is well above national norms.

The rocking of ages: don't be morose over the median

A further word or two are in order about age with which Pittsburgh has been obsessed because census data indicate that the region is not attracting immigrants at a high enough rate to off set natural population loss (deaths over births) and outmigration.

One result of those phenomena are the aforementioned median age of the population. In 2002 the national median age was 35.5 and median age of the region was 40.

A caution is in order here, however. When talking about subjects like potential audiences, qualitative measures are often as important as quantitative ones.

In the case of arts audiences, the primary concern is the total number of customers you are attracting; that number can go up because more people are coming more often to your performances or you are getting ever-increasing percentages of age groups that had been a "hard sell" in the past.

Given the fact that the median age of an adult Pittsburgher is probably around 48 today, "an average age of 55" probably ought not to be as high on your worry list as a number of other factors.

There is something in the air (and a lot of it comes from elsewhere)

The air we breathe is a very important commodity and Pittsburgh Today publishes a year-round indicator on the hour every day about particulate levels and a similar hourly report on ozone starting in April when the "season" of higher temperatures begins. There are also annual reports on the site comparing Pittsburgh's average and Pittsburgh's worst readings for the years 2004 to 2006 (and very shortly 2007). In the worst category in 2006 (as in highest particulate matter reading), nothing comes close to Pittsburgh's 100.7 recorded at the Liberty monitor near the Clairton Coke Works. (Philadelphia recorded the second highest number in 2006 at 63.06).

However, there are six other monitoring stations. When their highest daily readings are averaged, the picture changes somewhat with Charlotte replacing Pittsburgh last year as the benchmark city with highest average particulate reading. Highest and average readings on ozone are much more encouraging because the region's numbers have been coming down.

That said, if you look closely at the data you must conclude that there is vast room for improvement. If that is to occur, there will have to be changes in the way electricity is being generated in neighboring West Virginia and Ohio.

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John G. Craig Jr., who is former editor of the Post-Gazette, is the president of Pittsburgh Today and directs the program with four partners: Bernard Goldstein, retired dean of the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health; Granger Morgan, chairman of Carnegie Mellon's Department of Engineering and Public Policy; Paul O'Neill, former secretary of the U.S. Treasury and former chairman and CEO of Alcoa; and Lauren Resnick, director of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

The University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University are sponsors of the project, which is supported by private foundation funds and administered by the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Social and Urban Research.