Self-driving trucks begin mail delivery test for U.S. Postal Service
reuters.com
reuters.com
Along the main hallways there was some sort of retroreflective tape laid down, and the robot, which looked like and equipment cart, would follow that tape. At every stop it would sound a chime and the secretary for that section would come out and retrieve a bundle of mail and distribute it to their people.
Super simple implementation, but it worked quite well for what it did.
Such an odd thing that it might as well have happened, sadly I never managed to find any real history behind it.
It feels so very 1970s and nostalgic.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mailmobiles-mail-robot...
I think it followed markings on the floor. Zero computer vision, when it came your way you'd better watch out, it nearly squished me against a wall while I was watching it.
Really? This is exactly the kind of thing we should be spending tax dollars on. I have no idea why people think the USPS is this giant wasteful pit of money in the federal budget but they provide a lot of valuable services in addition to steady employment for a lot of Americans.
The benefit of UPS/FedEx is if they start leaving garbage in my front yard, I can sue them for littering.
If the USPS goes away there will be a very short adjustment period when private organizations and official government changes its mailing practices, but it will all be fine. I'm willing to make a compromise where the federal government can require that regular (weekly?) mail delivery be available everywhere in the country, and if it's not available from private sources the government can create one. So if you're in the boonies of the northern most territory of Alaska, you'll get weekly mail or something delivered by government subsidized mail service.
How is that the fault of the USPS? Mail "spam" wouldn't go away if UPS/FedEx took over the postal service via privatization.
I don't get that kind of logic at all.
Raising the lowest price for sending junk mail to the prices of UPSFedex would certainly reduce spam, but this has nothing to do with how the services are governed.
FWIW it appears you're free to individually act on your desire: https://www.quora.com/U-S-Postal-Service-Do-I-legally-have-t...
In practical terms I cannot stop having a mailbox, because a few times a year a check or something comes in the mail. That means I would have to go get my mail from the post office every so often and go through it all. So all that's accomplished is I have to drive a few miles down the road to pick up my USPS garbage instead of having the garbage delivered into my front yard. If the USPS didn't exist at all, everyone (businesses, official government notifications, etc) would switch to the better service providers like UPS/FedEx.
http://www.costhowmuch.com/ps/fedex-letter.htm
Of course, that comes with a guaranteed delivery date, insurance, tracking, etc. I'm sure the private carriers would charge more than the USPS if they were servicing the lowest end mail, but currently the USPS is monopolizing that.
Also important to note that the USPS is subsidized by the spam they deliver which primarily winds up in the landfill. If the USPS wasn't filling everyone's garbage bin with bulk rubbish every day, their clearing price would be closer to private shippers. To put a scale on that, I have one trash can in my house that is at my desk and only winds up getting garbage mail tossed in it. Every two weeks I have a 13 gallon garbage bag full of mail garbage. What is the time-cost of every household in my city dealing with that much extra junk? What is the environmental cost?
Pension funding politics aside, I want to pay USPS postage fees which cover the cost of the service they provide. There’s no reason to be paying below cost postage to USPS. I find that their rates are extremely competitive, particularly priority mail flat rate compared to UPS or FedEx.
I think the post office could be doing a lot more digital services in 2020 and I’d love to see a lot less junk mail, it would be nice if they could centralize the opt-outs.
It depends how you count the revenue, but by some accounts public transit is more heavily subsidized by State and Federal government than driving. This is especially true on a per-passenger-mile basis.
> It should be noted, however, that the 2006 postal law sought to provide the Postal Service with increased pricing flexibility and to promote simpler, quicker and more efficient process for changing postage prices. [1]
I think by and large current rates cover the costs. There is a weird international looohole which they are closing. We should not be subsidizing free shipping from China.
My point is mainly I don’t want to see taxpayer subsidies in excess of postage. I believe without the pension funding weirdness the USPS would be about break even, but there’s lots of conflicting information.
A concentrated disinformation campaign funded by people who stand to benefit from privatizing mail delivery. It started with the mandate to pre-fund pension and healthcare benefits for the next 75 years, funding pensions for retired employees who aren't even born yet. That means by federal mandate, the USPS is sitting on $400 billion that they can't touch [1]. That's not all bad in and of itself, but they're also limited by law on what they can charge for stamps, and the federal review board doesn't always let them increase prices to keep up with costs [2].
The same group of people who forced the USPS into an precedented fiscal nightmare are the same people going on TV and telling you that the USPS is fiscally irresponsible and a waste of money and should be privatized. Not a big surprise that Rep Tom Davis III was the author of the bill passed in 2006 but in 2004 FedEx was one of his biggest campaign contributors.
[1] https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/be-careful-what-you-assume
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/id/39439918
[3] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/hr6407
[4] https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors...
It's like smashing a window with a baseball bat to prove glass is easily breakable. Yes the glass broke, that's why you don't hit it with a baseball bat. Rather than replacing the windows with brick, how about just not hitting it with a baseball bat? If you want to prove how easily breakable the glass is, let is break (or not) on its own.
> If the USPS failed on its own, there might be a point to the argument that the government is inefficient. But when lawmakers destroy something and then claim that it destroyed itself and therefore we must destroy everything else, it doesn't quite seem right.
To be clear, I agree with this. I like the USPS, and think they do a great job.
The point is that grassroots support for "starve the beast" didn't start out focused on the USPS. The USPS was just one of the more vulnerable targets, plus some business stood to gain, so politicians directed the ire there. It's similar dynamic to how in these "government shutdowns", national parks close but the TSA keeps right on going. Or locally, how trying to keep real estate taxes down ends putting the screws on teachers and firefighters, rather than shrinking the town bureaucracy.
The larger point is to avoid simplistically ascribing the worst intent to the "other team". It's an easy answer, but prevents understanding that they actually have legitimate points. And it drives adherence to the agenda of your familiar team, which is also busy manufacturing consent for corporate agendas in a similar manner.
not only does the service get worse but cost actually goes up.
If the USPS is going to become irrelevant in the near-term, does stockpiling 75 years worth of pensions really make sense?
This is wholly inaccurate. All that the USPS is being required to do is set aside money to pay for pension liabilities that they have incurred. Nothing close to funding pensions for employees that have yet to be born.
Besides, this is all hypothetical as the USPS has not actually made the payments they were supposed to.
That's so 100% disprovable, so easily disprovable, disproven by the first link in the comment you directly replied to, that I'm have a hard time assuming good faith in your argument as the HN guidelines tell me to do.
Seriously? You should Google before becoming quite so self righteous:
>It is not the first time the Postal Service has missed its required payments to prefund retirees’ health benefits. From 2012 through 2016, the agency failed to deliver nearly $34 billion toward its pool for retirees’ health care.
https://www.govexec.com/management/2017/09/usps-defaults-bil...
At best, I might be able to twist the words to say "the USPS's money problems aren't real because they can't afford to pay their debt", which makes no sense.
The reality of the situation is the $5.7b they're required to pay every year is more than they can afford to pay, so they paid it until they reached $8b in debt and then stopped paying. None of that is hypothetical in any way.
>Please explain your use of the word "hypothetical".
Hypothetical as in they are not actual real outflows of cash from the USPS. They can't be blamed for the USPS' financial woes since they haven't made a payment in 7 years now.
If I owe you money and I stop paying and my argument for stopping paying you is that I don't have any money left, do you claim that my money problems are hypothetical because I haven't paid it all? No. They're very real, highlighted by the fact that I can't pay the rest.
Anyway, the point is moot, since the prefunding period is over and the payments are now on the permanent schedule. Because the Post Office couldn’t fully find the account, the fund is now running deficits and will be depleted in a decade.
So, yes, they have to fund. And they're struggling because they're being subject to deliberate and malicious political attack on public services.
They have to set aside money to pay pension obligations that they have incurred to their current employees. No money is being set aside to pay pensions for workers who have yet to be born. A tiny fraction of the money set aside may be paid out in 75 years, but it won't be to a worker that has yet to be born. It would be paid to a current USPS employee that is still living 75 years from now.
>So, yes, they have to fund. And they're struggling because they're being subject to deliberate and malicious political attack on public services.
For other reasons, perhaps, but not for the pre-funding requirement.
Because republicans have spent decades trying to kill it. Before the post office was forced to pay pensions fund up front by republicans [1] it was self sustainable.
> Because republicans have spent decades trying to kill it. Before the post office was forced to pay pensions fund up front by republicans [1] it was self sustainable.
The PAEA was passed unanimously in both chambers of Congress and with the support of two of the employee unions. source: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/hr6407
The pre-funding period ended in 2017 -- Current retirees are paid from this fund. Since the USPS missed the majority of its payments to the PRHB, the fund is currently running deficits and will be depleted by 2030. source: https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/694188.pdf
That means that even if it was "Pay As You Go", it would not be self sustainable.
The NALC actually deleted their page in support of the legislation but luckily it's archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20130805121847/https://www.nalc....
> Thanks to NALC and a coalition of other unions (the Rural Letter Carriers and the Mail Handlers), management associations, vendors and mailers, Congress rejected almost all the negative recommendations of President Bush’s blue-ribbon Commission on the Postal Service. Instead it crafted a balanced compromise that emphasized pragmatism over ideology.
> Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) were instrumental in negotiating the final details with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the bill’s chief sponsor in the Senate. In an e-Activist message sent on December 9, NALC President Bill Young thanked Waxman and Carper for advocating NALC’s interests in the legislation. He also thanked Sens. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Daniel Akaka (D-HI), and Reps. Tom Davis (R-VA), Danny Davis (D-IL) and John McHugh (R-NY) for their roles over the years.
This is how you know a vehicle is self-driving: there are two people sat in the front.
A monitor can be paid less than a driver, as they’re doing less work, and can respond to onsite issues more promptly and accurately than could a remote one.
A monitor probably needs more knowledge than a driver (need to know the specifics of the product, how to fix problems etc.), and has the same downsides (long hours, not especially exciting job, bad work hours, sitting all the time etc.). If anything I would think they would be paid more.
In my view the monitor would be a driver with standard knowledge and experience who could drive if the autonomous system encountered an edge case or for last-mile, i.e., from the freeway to the shipping or receiving facility.
Under those circumstances a load traveling ten hours with six hours of loading and unloading time would require two hours of active work and fourteen hours of standby.
Any driver would accept a lower rate for this kind of arrangement.
It’s not the same process as the autonomous urban driving being attempted by Waymo et al. Driving from Phoenix to Dallas on the highway is far simpler than driving around Phoenix.
Major West: And the monkey flips the switch. -- Lost In Space, 1998
Instructions can be, push the big red button if anything happens.
The monitor would be in place to manage the last-mile driving and any other technically-challenging aberrations on the route. Human skill and judgement would still be required, just for much shorter periods.
People working full time still need to live you know, even if it's "less work". Last time I checked the "amount" of work doesn't really correlate with the pay too.
You can't tell a professional truck driver "Ok man, you'll be in the same seat, on the same road, for the same amount of time but you get $500 instead of $1500 because it's less work, oh and also if there is a crash and you weren't 100% focused you'll be liable for the damage"
Automating large parts of the driving process would make the job easier and more desirable. More people would be willing to work as monitors, which would increase truck availability and lower rates.
There’s also the possibility that a monitor could do other work while the truck drove. Team drivers already do this; the passive driver occupies herself when not driving by reading or even dispatching other loads.
All the studies say this is actually more dangerous, which is why Waymo abandoned L3 development years ago when they discovered their safety drivers were falling asleep at the wheel. And there's the infamous Uber death which is well documented and analyzed.
"Monitor" might be a misnomer, here, in that the monitor isn't expected to be actively watching what the truck is doing; rather the monitor would be expected to respond to infrequent issues and maybe handle off-highway driving to and from shipping and receiving facilities.
I understand they organisers wanted something cool, but it was comical to observe nonetheless.
[Edit: punctuation]
Lockers (or luggage storage generally outside of hotels) are, in general, pretty scarce in the US--and at least a lot of Europe in my experience. It's one of the things that makes a regular hotel pretty handy; I can drop off my luggage the day I arrive or leave and not have to restrict my activities until it's time to checkin or depart.
The main railway station in a European town sometimes has luggage storage. In Germany that's usually lockers, in countries with more history of terrorism (like the UK) it's a room with a metal detector and an attendant.
There’s an immediate need and it would save companies a lot of money.
A freight train labour cost is much smaller comparing to trucking.
> Under RSIA08, PTC is required on about 60,000 miles of railroad track. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) estimates full PTC implementation will cost approximately $14 billion. [1]
I understand that everything looks simple from the outside, and these have to be rugged, reliable, redundant, and failsafe, but that’s a lot of dollars per mile for sensors.
> PTC uses signals and sensors along the track to communicate train location, speed restrictions, and moving authority. If the locomotive is violating a speed restriction or moving authority, on- board equipment will automatically slow or stop the train. A more expansive version of PTC, called communications-based train control (CBTC), would bring additional safety benefits plus business benefits for railroad operators, such as increased capacity and reduced fuel consumption. However, CBTC is not currently being installed by any U.S. railroad, due to the additional cost and the challenge of meeting implementation deadlines.
So we’re talking about basically AEB (automatic emergency braking) for trains, and it costs $200k per mile to deploy? I don’t get it.
> Based on analysis of past PTC-preventable incidents, the FRA estimated in 2009 that $90 million in annual safety benefits will be realized after full implementation of PTC.
Oh good, breakeven without accounting for any time value of money in only 155 years. The only word that comes to mind is boondoggle.
How far ahead does AEB look? Because trains take miles to stop. The system is different to account for that.
The two dimensions being track offset (distance from start of line), and time.
This isn’t even obstacle detection. This is a) obeying the speed limit, and b) not asking two known entities to occupy the same length of track at the same time.
It does not, for example, detect a car stuck on the tracks at the next railroad crossing.
The consequences of individual crashes is also higher, which changes the perception and consequences of mistakes, even if the number of trucks means the actual scale of the problem might be similar.
Arguable a mechanical interlocking also counts, as it prevented unsafe routes being set for a train, and made it faster to set the intended route: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking
I'm going to bet for both safety and employment, trains and transport ships are orders of magnitude more efficient already. Trucks are a pretty big source of human inefficiency.
You'd probably be able to run more smaller trains with automation, but competing with trucks is tough, because the efficiency gains associated with getting rid of people and adding automation are blown away by the need to cross-dock and do the last mile via local truck.
If anyone else is - turns out, there's a wikipedia page which has more information on very long trains (it's true):
The cost savings from getting rid of a train driver aren’t nearly as great either since the driver:passenger ratio is different between car and train.
A handy map of projects worldwide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_con...
A little story about the MTA's experience:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMT_Canarsie_Line#Automation_a...
It doesn't really paint an accurate picture of how many are out of work, but getting by through alternative or illegal-quasi-legal means.
It also in no way measures the number of jobs a defined unit of work can supply, or whether the job itself creates enough of a return to be economically feasible to the doer.
It also in no way reflects that many jobs mow push for pre-acquired qualifications, which cost money, and lock out potential workforce.
No one wants to measure any of that. That leads to awkward questions.
“Regulatory constraints” refers to FMCSA’s hours-of-service rules, the legal limit to how many hours a driver may operate a truck in a given day. [1]
[0] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/09/576752327/trucking-industry-s...
[1] https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-...
Pays $680 a week, he's home every 2 weeks, and as a bonus he gets to unload the truck.
Not a terrible job, but not many people want to work that schedule, and a life on the road isn't probably ideal.
If you assume he's driving the FMCSA limit of 60 hours in 7 consecutive days, the hourly wage is lower. And if you count all the time he's away from home, it's lower still. And he's paying for truck stop food and sleeping in his cab to boot.
And a far cry from the reports of $73,000 reported in some sources [1]
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/09/news/economy/truck-driver-s...
Literally unload? Does this mean something else? I wouldn't see this as a bonus.
This would be more likely for smaller-format discount retail like, e.g., the Dollar Store or a restaurant supply chain.
There was a woman who worked in Lansing, Michigan sorting mail. She worked in the back, never had an contact with customers. Every Halloween she'd wear a different costume to work. Three years straight she'd get disciplined for it.
Local TV asked if the employees she worked alongside had a problem with it but they didn't. Only management had a problem with her wearing a costume every Halloween. She said they are determined to stamp out all individuality in the employees. What a horrible place to work.
They could have a notification app or send an email/text that the delivery is there. The person would then waddle out to the delivery truck.
Drone, robot, or mechanical arm thing.
> San Diego-based startup TuSimple said its self-driving trucks will begin hauling mail between USPS facilities in Phoenix and Dallas to see how the nascent technology might improve delivery times and costs. A safety driver will sit behind the wheel to intervene if necessary and an engineer will ride in the passenger seat.
> A safety driver will sit behind the wheel to intervene if necessary and an engineer will ride in the passenger seat.
There are no self driving cars in existence. At least not ones that are even remotely competitive with human drivers.
Really?