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arts / rec.arts.tv / Re: Left-wing states sue post office for ordering 148,000 gasoline powered trucks

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o Re: Left-wing states sue post office for ordering 148,000 gasolineRhino

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Re: Left-wing states sue post office for ordering 148,000 gasoline powered trucks

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Subject: Re: Left-wing states sue post office for ordering 148,000 gasoline
powered trucks
Date: Sun, 8 May 2022 14:31:01 -0400
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 by: Rhino - Sun, 8 May 2022 18:31 UTC

On 2022-05-08 10:34 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
> RichA <rander3128@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Post Master General rightly said "alternate fuel" vehicles are not
>> vetted for postal deliveries, they do not have enough data on them,
>> don't have the expensive charging infrastructure for electrics and they
>> need to replace their aging fleet now.
>
> The fleet has always been inappropriate, traditionally a Jeep base
> because there were lots of surplus Jeeps after WWII. There are two kinds
> of routes in low density residential areas that city carriers who drive
> would serve. The first is called park-and-loop. The city carrier parks
> the vehicle in the middle of the block and circles the block on foot.
> If the homes were built in subdivisions before 1962 (I think), they have
> mailboxes at the front door or mail slots through the front door. A tear
> down in an older subdivision is allowed to have a mailbox at the front
> door. 1962 and later, the subdivision must have the mailbox at the
> street. If the route has mailboxes at the street, the city carrier
> drives from one to the next and tries to reach in without rising from
> the driving position, which is right-hand drive.
>
I haven't been in the US in several years now but I have certainly been
in urban areas, both downtown and suburban, and I don't recall EVER
having seen mailboxes at the street in either environment. When I
visited LA and San Francisco, I don't recall seeing a mailbox at the
street, although I certainly wasn't looking for them. I had several
visits to Boston and ended up seeing quite a bit of the area, including
a trip to Cape Cod, and if there was a mailbox at the street in the
suburbs I traversed, I feel sure I would have noticed and asked someone
about it.

> A rural carrier serves a route that always has mailboxes at the street.
> If the rural carrier drives in one direction on a street, which is
> typical, the mailboxes must be erected on that side of the street.
>
> Each and every time the carrier must leave the vehicle, on a park and
> loop route or to bring a package to the front door or collect a
> signature, he is required to shut off the engine and lock the doors and
> windows. Each and every time.

That seems eminently reasonable since the postman might otherwise find
the vehicle stolen by either joy riders or professional thieves and/or
find the mail still in the vehicle stolen.

> These engines are constantly being
> started, which no starter motor was ever designed for. In a gasoline
> powered vehicle, the worst pollution is always at startup.
>
Strangely enough, the buses used by every municipal transit operation
I've seen in this country inevitably leave the engine running, even when
the driver has stepped away to have a bathroom break or get a coffee. It
is entirely likely that passengers may be on the bus at this time and
the driver may well leave the door open so that passengers can board or
leave while he is away. I've always wondered how they justify that,
especially in cities with anti-idling bylawas. (London, Ontario, for
example, limits idling to something like 30 seconds as I recall but I
believe they have an exemption for city buses.) I tended to assume that
they were concerned about restarting the bus once it's turned off but
maybe someone has done some calculations and determined that even
leaving the bus running for 20 minutes while the driver steps away is
less of an issue in terms of pollution than turning it off and then back
on.

And no, I've never heard of a joy rider or thief just driving away with
a bus ;-)

> The post office local delivery fleet therefore pollutes like crazy, and
> always had. So yeah, a fleet of trucks in local delivery like the post
> office owns actually would have been appropriate for electric vehicles,
> especially those used on park-and-loop routes.

Why "especially" for the park-and-loop routes? Those would appear to be
the trucks that are stopped and started the least.

> Converting decades ago to
> battery vehicles -- oversized golf carts -- would have made a hell of a
> lot of sense.
>
> Today's post office has absolutely no cash and hasn't gotten very far
> replacing vehicles that needed replacement planning starting 15 years ago.
>
> People don't realize this: In high-density areas of cities, city
> carriers don't drive at all. I've seen carriers dispatched from the
> delivery unit station who take city buses, then walk the entire route.
> The largest buildings typically have a deal in which mail is brought to
> the building's dock by semitrailer and then distributed within the
> building to employees of the company or smaller tenants of the building.
> The carrier may not enter the building unless a signature is required.
>
> Carrier routes that collect from street-collection boxes and mailboxes in
> large building lobbies -- very few of these routes are left considering how
> few street collection boxes remain -- drive larger trucks.

Street collection boxes are increasingly rare in the US? That's the
standard blue boxes that used to be all over for depositing mail for the
post office to deliver? I assume that's because snail mail is
increasingly rare with most people using email or couriers.

> Again, these
> are shut off every time the carrier exits the vehicle. I don't know how
> practical battery power would have been but I suppose it's practical today.

I think we're at the point where we could largely shut down the post
office altogether. Every envelope I get could just as easily be sent as
an email attachment. We'd still need couriers and delivery services for
packages but letter delivery could be done away with or delegated to
couriers. Of course, the law would need to change so that it stopped
forcing courier companies to charge at least 3 times as much as basic
mail delivery, which is a long-standing rule in this country to protect
the post office from competition.

--
Rhino

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