Earlier this week the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program released its signature report, The State of Metropolitan America. The study is a comprehensive examination of a range of data indicators on America’s 100 largest metro regions. According to the project’s website, the analysis "portrays the demographic and social trends shaping the nation’s essential economic and societal units—its large metropolitan areas—and discusses what they imply for public policies to secure prosperity for these places and their populations."
To say that the report is data-rich is a massive understatement (if that’s not an oxymoron), and I don’t pretend to have digested all of it it. I did, however, take a quick look at the report’s commuting data (presented in interactive form here), and out of the 100 regions these are the best and worst performers.
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