The Senior Scene

(Pictured: Kerri Foley is a volunteer with the American Red Cross Disaster Action Team.)

When people lost their  homes in a fire at a Lakewood apartment complex in July, the local chapter of the American Red Cross mobilized immediately to provide help and hope to the displaced residents. Red Cross volunteers set up individuals and families with overnight shelter for a safe place to stay, as well as meals, items of comfort, and community resources. 

Red Cross services like that are made possible by people like Kerri Foley. She has been with the Red Cross for about three years, serving as a Disaster Action Team volunteer.  

“I like to help people,” she said as she unloaded cots and other items for the Lakewood fire victims who were staying overnight in the Red Cross shelter. “This is just my way of giving back.”   

Every day, disasters force people from their homes. The Red Cross needs more people in Pierce, Thurston, and Kitsap counties to be volunteers and help local families cope with emergencies.  

Disaster Action Team (DAT) members respond day and night, most often in the aftermath of fires that threaten lives, destroy property, and displace entire families. While the work can be emotional and challenging, it’s also deeply rewarding, according to the Red Cross. A spokeswoman for the organization noted that volunteers provide support and assistance to people in their darkest moments. That helping hand includes emotional support, replacing prescription medications, financial assistance for food, clothing and temporary lodging, and other critically needed items or referrals. 

All required training for DAT is provided by the Red Cross free of charge. Information on how to get involved is at redcross.org.

Another example of the important role of volunteering is Kirby Engel, who has logged 3,360 hours of community service through the Retired Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP). He’s one of 135 volunteers who are helping various organizations in Pierce and Kitsap counties via the program administered locally by Lutheran Community Services Northwest.

“Our amazing volunteers have served 13,000 hours in the last 12 months alone,” said Rena Marken, supervisor of the program that pairs volunteers with schools, museums, medical providers, and food banks, among others.

One of the latter is the Tacoma-based Nourish Pierce County food banks, which hosted a ceremony Aug. 14 honoring Engel and five other RSVP participants who have individually racked up hours in the hundreds and thousands. Cheryl Fox and Jesme Fernando have 1,680 and 1,030 hours under their belts, respectively, Barbara Hadley has 469, Bruce Weathers has 383, and Carola Wittmann has 189.

The salute drew some dignitaries–Michael Smith, chief executive officer of AmeriCorps, the federal agency that supports volunteer programs like RSVP, and U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, who praised the “incredible work” of the volunteers.

Information on RSVP is available at lcsnw.org and 253-722-5695.

(Pictured: Seattle-Tacoma motorists face an average rush-hour speed of 21 miles per hour–one of the worse in the U.S., according to a national study. Photo credit: Cascade PBS Newsroom)

Just how bad is the traffic around here?

The most congested cities across America – ones where 17 miles an hour is the average speed during rush hours — have been revealed in a recent study, and the Seattle-Tacoma metro area is one of the 10 worst, slogging along at number 7.

With an average rush-hour speed of 21 miles per hour, a little better than the national mark, Seattle-Tacoma has some of the most jam-packed roads in America, according to the study by Stressfreecarrental.com

New York City motorists have it the worst, travelling at an average of just 12 mph during peak drive hours. Motorists in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco are the second and third worst-off, respectively, at 14 and 15 mph. The rest of the top (or should that be bottom?) 10 are Boston, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Miami. 

The study, unsurprisingly, concludes that drivers are experiencing slow-moving traffic every day.

“As the U.S. tries to improve its air quality, pollution, and reduction of emissions, we need to help traffic flow more freely,” a study spokesman said. “This might involve pumping more funding into improving roads and public transportation to tackle the issue.”

More roads and highways may not be the solution. A phenomenon of “induced roadway demand” was first noticed in the 1930s, most dramatically in New York City, where “master builder” Robert Moses presided over a massive program of parkway and bridge construction. Each new project was necessary, it seemed, to alleviate traffic congestion. And yet, soon enough, the new roads were just as clogged as the old.

The opposite is true, too — call it reduced demand. You might imagine that cutting road capacity would lead to more traffic jams. Indeed, whenever a highway, road or bridge closure is planned, predictions of “carmaggedon” inevitably ensue. But that’s not what actually happens. Instead, traffic congestion is often no worse than before. Sometimes it even improves.

It turns out that more roads cause more driving. This may be counterintuitive, but the effect has been thoroughly documented. The new “generated traffic” doesn’t appear all at once; it can take several years. But the more congested an urban area already is, the faster new roads will fill up. And all this increased driving can’t simply be attributed to growing population. Road expansion leads to more vehicle miles traveled per capita. That also means more greenhouse gas emissions pumped into the atmosphere.

But how much more?

There’s a tool to help answer that question. The Rocky Mountain Institute, an international organization focused on decarbonizing energy systems, launched an Induced Travel Calculator for the United States. You choose your state, urban area, road type, and the number of lane miles a proposed project would add. The calculator tells how many vehicle miles and metric tons of emissions will result once the generated traffic effect sets in.

For example: Twenty new lane miles of interstate highway in the Seattle area will generate 103 million to 155 million additional vehicle miles traveled annually, which would burn about 7 million gallons of gas. By 2050, the cumulative direct emissions produced by this stretch of roadway would total between half a million and 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That range is important. The upper end represents business as usual. The lower end represents a scenario aligned with achieving the U.S. Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement, including “100 percent electrification of new passenger vehicles by 2035 and rapid renewable power development,” according to the calculator’s methodology.

In other words, even with an ambitious timeline for vehicle electrification and clean energy, we just can’t keep building new highways and expect to reduce emissions. That hard truth is what inspired the calculator.

“We’ve aligned the strategy of our work around the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 1.5 degrees Celsius carbon budget,” said Ben Holland, a manager for the Rocky Mountain Institute. “We came to this realization that even if we put 70 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030, we’d still have to reduce vehicle miles traveled by 20 percent.”

“Nothing prevents the states from doing the right thing and distributing more funds to cities for transit and building complete streets,” said Holland. “But history suggests that states tend to funnel that money into regional highway projects, of which most are expansions and not repairs.”

Washington has a poor track record when it comes to making these kinds of decisions. According to analysis by the Washington Post, Washington is “the eighth worst in the country for its share of roads in poor condition, at 27 percent. At the same time, more than three-fourths of the state’s spending on roads went toward expansion — fourth-highest in the nation.”

Holland hopes the Induced Travel Calculator will help advocates at the state and local levels educate lawmakers and influence the distribution of transportation funds.

Andrew Kidde, transportation team lead at the climate action group 350 Washington, wants to do just that. He noted the Washington Legislature has considered “these things without any information about vehicle miles traveled and greenhouse gas impacts. “Why do you have targets if you’re not going to measure what your projects do?”

Suppose the Legislature could muster the will to stop building new highways. What should it fund instead?

That’s an easy question for Abby Griffith to answer: Public transit, and not just for the most urbanized areas. Griffith grew up in rural Ridgefield, 15 miles outside of Vancouver, where she now lives in low-income housing near the edge of the city.

“Downtown there’s a lot of buses, there’s options, but for people like me there’s no way I could afford to live in downtown Vancouver,” said Griffith,  who’s blind and depends on the transit system to get around. “Sometimes it takes me an hour to get to the store, especially if I have to transfer. If we had a transportation system that works, a lot more low-income or disabled people could get jobs.”

Upending the highway-heavy status quo won’t be easy. There’s political pressure from the corporations that profit from new highway construction and car dependence; trade unions whose members build new highways; and constituents who believe that expansions will ease congestion. There’s also the state constitution, which restricts the expenditure of gas tax revenues to “highway purposes.”

“The highways have been expanded ever since Robert Moses got his hands on Long Island,” said Kidde. “It generates its own next stage, because you’ve always got one community or another complaining, or you’ve invested $5 million into the engineering and no one wants to say we’re abandoning that. It just keeps going. There’s no good time to stop. Let’s stop now.”

Sources: Cascade PBS newsroom, previously known as Crosscut, a non-profit news site covering the Pacific Northwest, and StressFreeCarRental.com, a website for information on car rentals and related topics, contributed to this report.

(Pictured: T-Mobile Park (previously called Safeco Field) became the Seattle Mariners’ home 25 years ago. Also seen here is the Kingdome, where the team played until the domed edifice was torn down).

By Glenn Drosendahl

On July 15, 1999, Safeco Field — a long-sought (and since renamed T-Mobile Park) baseball-only stadium with a retractable roof — opened to critical acclaim and some public resentment.

The new half-billion dollar home of the Seattle Mariners is the product of a financing plan thrashed out by the Legislature after a different public-private financing plan was narrowly defeated at the polls. Construction was rushed and made more difficult by many design changes. But when the building opened, it was a showcase for the city and a moneymaker for the Mariners.

Team owners had complained about the Kingdome almost from the time the major league team began playing there in 1977. King County owned the massive concrete building, which had opened in 1976 with the National Football League’s Seattle Seahawks as its primary tenant. It was designed as a multi-purpose stadium, but was better-suited for football. And, as a series of Mariners owners pointed out, it lacked the revenue-producing features of newer baseball stadiums, putting them at a competitive disadvantage. The Mariners’ Kingdome lease was due to expire in 1996, and the team’s owners were not inclined to renew it. They wanted a new stadium and public money to help build it.

On Jan. 11, 1995, a task force appointed by then-King County Executive Gary Locke recommended the public pay about 65 percent of the cost of a new baseball-only stadium on county-owned land south of the Kingdome. The new stadium, estimated to cost between $243 million and $278 million, would have a retractable roof and be designed to maximize the team’s revenues. The task force said that without such a stadium, the Mariners had no future in Seattle.

Responding to the task force recommendation, the Legislature passed a financing plan that would raise the sales tax in King County from 8.2 percent to 8.3 percent. The county approved the plan in late July. It would require voter approval in September, however, and polls suggested it had little chance. The Mariners gained support by being in a pennant race for the first time in their history, but it wasn’t quite enough. The financing plan was defeated by less than 1 percent of the vote.

The Mariners owners, led by John Ellis, said they would sell the team if the ballot measure lost. But with fan interest mounting daily as the team contended for the playoffs, the owners said they would delay their decision until Oct. 31. By Oct. 2, the Mariners were division champions for the first time. On Oct. 8, they beat the New York Yankees in an epic playoff series and were off to play for the American League championship. Meanwhile, Ellis met with Governor Mike Lowry and legislative leaders to make the case for a new stadium. While the Mariners were playing the Cleveland Indians for the league title, Lowry called a special session of the Legislature to deal with the stadium issue.

After intense debate, the Legislature authorized a tax package to fund a $320 million stadium; the package was then approved by the King County Council. The taxes would be on food and drink sold at restaurants, bars, and taverns in King County, on car and truck rentals, and on tickets sold at the new stadium. This time, voter approval wasn’t required, a source of rancor among those who opposed the earlier financing plan.

The stadium was inspired by popular retro-style ballparks built earlier in the 1990s in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver. It combined nostalgic touches such as a red brick exterior and hand-operated scoreboard with modern touches such as restaurants, wide concourses, and a giant video screen in centerfield. When the gates opened in 1999, more than 40,000 fans saw the Seattle Symphony Orchestra play “Thus Sprach Zarathustra,” the theme from the movie “2001: Space Odyssey,” while the roof silently and majestically rolled opened. Play-by-play broadcaster Dave Niehaus, who had been with the team since its inception, donned a tux and threw out the ceremonial first pitch. After 22 years of playing their home games on artificial turf — and five years of fighting for a new stadium — the Mariners were treated to real grass and blue skies.

The ballpark quickly proved its value. Attendance for its first two seasons topped 6.6 million, the best in the major leagues. By the end of 2002, the Mariners had paid off their $100 million line of credit for cost overruns, and payment on the public debt was running ahead of schedule. Some of that payback was driven by the action on the field, but a good share could be attributed to the sheer attractiveness of the ballpark.

Source: Historylink.org, a non-profit online encyclopedia of Washington state history.

(Pictured: The wage gap between 65-plus workers and ones between 25 and 64 has narrowed significantly, according to Pew Research Center.)

By Richard Fry and Dana Braga

Roughly 19 percent of Americans 65 and older were employed in 2023 – nearly double the share of that age group who were working 35 years ago.

According to a survey by Pew Research Center, not only are older workers increasing in number, but their earning power has grown in recent decades. In 2022, the typical 65-plus worker earned $22 per hour, up from $13 in 1987.  Earnings for younger workers haven’t grown as much. As a result, the wage gap between older workers and those ages 25 to 64 has narrowed significantly.

Today’s older workers are also different from the past in other important ways:

• They’re working more hours, on average, than in previous decades— 62 percent full-time, compared with 47 percent in 1987.
•  They’re more likely to have a four-year college degree. Forty-four percent have a bachelor’s degree or more education, compared with 18 percent in 1987. That puts them about on par with workers ages 25 to 64.
• They’re more likely to be receiving employer-provided benefits such as pension plans and health insurance. Younger  workers’ access to these employer-provided benefits has decreased in recent decades. For example, among workers 65 and older, 36 percent now have the option to participate in an employer or union-sponsored retirement plan (either an old-style pension or a 401(k)-type plan), up from 33 percent in 1987. Only 41 percent of younger workers such retirement plans at work, down from 55 percent in 1987.

Continuing a longstanding trend, older workers are more than twice as likely as younger ones to be self-employed (23 percent to 10 percent).

Taking all these factors into account – more older adults in the workforce, working longer hours with higher levels of education and greater pay per hour – older workers’ overall contribution to the labor force has grown quite a bit. In 2023, they accounted for 7 percent of all wages and salaries paid by U.S. employers–more than triple the share in 1987 (2 percent).

Pew Research Center found that workers  65 and older are more satisfied with their jobs overall than younger workers and less likely to say their work is stressful.

The percentage of older workers in western Washington varies dramatically. Based on data from the U.S.  Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census, Seattle is the 26^th-ranked city nationally at 25 percent, while Tacoma (16 percent) and Vancouver (15 percent) are in the bottom-15.

Various studies and reports, including one from AARP, have revealed that nationally, about a quarter of workers 50 or older think they’ll never retire. Their reasons include rising costs of living, lack of retirement funds, and a desire to remain in jobs that they like. In Washington, 43 percent of private-sector employees don’t have access to an employer retirement plan, according to the state Department of Commerce.

Gender, race, and the older workforce

The demographic makeup of the U.S. workforce overall has changed substantially in recent decades. Some of those changes reflect broader societal shifts, like more women entering the labor force and going to college. Others are tied to the changing racial and ethnic makeup of the country. These trends can be seen across the older and younger workforces.

Women are a larger share of the older workforce than in the past. Today, women represent 46 percent of all workers ages 65 and older. Their share was 40 percent in 1987 and 33 percent in 1964. This trend mirrors almost exactly the pattern seen among younger workers.

In addition, older women today (42 percent) are much more likely than their predecessors (12 percent in 1987) to have a four-year college degree. And older women are now about as likely as men to have a bachelor’s degree or more education—42 percent and 45 percent, respectively.

In years past, men of all ages were more likely than women to have a college degree.

The young adult population is at the forefront of racial and ethnic change in the U.S., and the demographics of the labor force reflect that.

Majorities of older and younger workforces are White, but those shares have declined from previous decades. Meanwhile, shares of Black and Hispanic adults have risen. Still, the younger workforce remains more racially and ethnically diverse: 59 percent of 25 to 64-year-olds are White, compared with 75 percent of those 65 and older. And 19 percent of workers among the younger workforce are Hispanic, compared with 9 percent of older workers.

In addition, 20 percent of younger workers today are foreign-born, compared with 16 percent of older workers. (Data isn’t available prior to 1994.)

Source: Pew Research Center (pewresearch.org), a non-partisan researcher of public opinion, issues, and trends.