The San Francisco Bay Area has established an innovative monitoring initiative to track our region’s performance – helping us to better understand historical trends, intraregional differences, and competitiveness with other major metropolitan areas. These measurements are our region’s Vital Signs – indicators that help us understand where we are succeeding and where we are falling short. Led by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), this effort relies upon extensive collaboration with the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission.
What is a Vital Signs Measure?
A Vital Signs measure is a specific indicator that allows us to understand the Bay Area’s performance regarding transportation, land use, environmental, and economic trends. This data-driven website is a compilation of these variables, and our regional performance in each one is quantified and assessed alongside similar data from cities, counties, and other peer metropolitan areas. Many of these measures originate from the performance targets developed in Plan Bay Area, the region's long-range transportation and housing blueprint.
How This Site Works
As you explore the homepage, you will find an overview of each of the Vital Signs performance areas. These areas will link you to individual measure pages where you can view graphs and maps that highlight the performance of the region, of individual cities and counties, and of peer metropolitan areas. For the first time, this website compiles regional, state, and national data sources to provide a frame of reference for how we’re performing as a whole. This data-compilation showcases nearly 40 measures, giving the user the tools to understand how our Vital Signs measure against our neighboring cities and other metropolitan areas. All data is downloadable on each of the measure pages or through the Data Center. We invite you to explore our region’s Vital Signs.
Can residents get where they need to go safely, reliably, and without undue delay?
Transporting the Bay Area
From buses and bikes to automobiles and our own two feet, Bay Area residents have many transportation options available to them. Yet while our region is a national leader in terms of the range of transportation options, our day-to-day travel hasn’t changed much over the past half-century.
Under transportation measures, explore interactive elements that assess how well the Bay Area fares with regard to transportation issues. There you’ll have the opportunity to view how increased traffic congestion, public transportation use and the condition of our infrastructure may affect the region’s economy in the coming years.
How will our growth affect the Bay Area’s landscape?
How We Use Our Land
The Bay Area’s 7,179 square miles are home to some seven million residents and the region’s economy employs nearly three million workers. While jobs and housing have historically been clustered near the Bay, development trends in the latter half of the 20th century tended to push growth outward towards smaller towns and cities.
With land use measures, explore interactive elements that assess how the Bay Area fares when it comes to our land use patterns. There you’ll have the opportunity to view recent trends, such as growth being increasingly focused in traditional urban centers like San Francisco.
How well does our economy harness the skills and energies of workers?
Jobs and Economic Growth in the Bay Area
Innovative, dynamic and admirably diversified, the Bay Area economy enjoys a well-deserved reputation as a stellar performer among U.S. metro areas. Many statistical measures give evidence of this economic success. Yet even as it has grown to become the 21st-largest economy in the world, our region faces challenges.
With economic measures, explore interactive elements that assess how the Bay Area fares when it comes to a series of economic trends. There you’ll have the opportunity to view how the high cost of housing and the uneven effects of prosperity are two factors that might have economic consequences for the region.
Can we protect our environment while allowing for regional growth?
Environmental Conditions in the Bay Area
The scenic beauty of San Francisco Bay and the surrounding extensive system of interconnected parks and open space have long attracted visitors, immigrants and business to our region. Maintaining these natural assets while still managing to sustain and grow a vital and urbane metropolitan region is a constant balancing act, requiring a careful monitoring of our environmental impacts.
With environmental measures, explore interactive elements that assess how the Bay Area fares when it comes to maintaining clean air, preserving the Bay, minimizing impacts from climate change, and ensuring safety on streets in our neighborhoods.
Now it’s your turn to explore our region’s Vital Signs! Each of the measure boxes below is associated with one of the four matching-color categories shown above them — transportation, land use, the economy, and the environment.
