Reinventing the Mail Truck | Hacker News Reader

Reinventing the Mail Truck

nytimes.com

8 pointse15ctr0n16 comments

Before I worked @ my current job hacking together DSLs I was a postie in Canada while going to school. Those new trucks are almost exactly the same as the one's used here, but left-hand drive. Problem w/right-hand drive is the enormous blind spot where you don't see people stepping off the curb in front of your truck or cyclists using a 4 way stop. Look at the picture of the guy in the older truck, there's 2 beams obstructing his view and the side mirrors (the mirrors on the left side are the same size as the right side). When you pull up to a 4 way stop and glance over to the right anybody on a bicycle is perfectly obstructed by the double mirrors and double beams. They of course go first and you think you're clear to go and almost hit them every time. This happened so much we had to roll down the windows and actually stick our heads out to look to see who was on the right in an intersection. Probably something to think about when they design these vehicles.

Canada Post are also concentrating on parcels and not caring so much any more about lettermail or physical spam as a result are making $200+ million per quarter in profit now as Fedex and UPS losing business to them.

They are also contracting out somebody to build them new devices and dumping Microsoft handheld scanners for something else, which they haven't decided upon yet. If you run such a corp should probably start shilling your services to them.

I wonder if a company like tesla would put in a bid? You'd think electric would be the way to go when they spend over half a billion on gas each year, the extra cost for the vehicles would pay itself off pretty quickly.

For the constant stopping and starting these vehicles do, it does seem like electric would be perfect. How many miles a day does a typical mail delivery truck run? Let say the overall average speed of the truck through out the day is 10 mph. That puts in in the ballpark of 75 - 100 miles/day. Given that it's all stop-start movement, that would probably exhaust the battery pack that comes with the Model S. Regenerative braking would help, though.

Seems perfectly doable. Feel free to correct my napkin math. I could be off quite a bit but Fermi-wise I think I'm good.

Background on the current Grumman LLV (Long Life Vehicle): http://postalmuseum.si.edu/collections/object-spotlight/llv....

Working video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qahIvBF3d7g

Type "USPS Vehicle Catches Fire" into google. For some reason the Grumman LLV's tend to randomly ignite, so often that Canada ended their lifespan early and replaced them all with small Ford Transits. Granted this was after decades of being driven like they were stolen.

Here's a better idea for a USPS mail truck: End the USPS.

All I get is spam. Why are taxpayers subsidizing advertisers?

You think they offer bulk mail services at a loss?

That seems like the mail they are best able to adjust prices on.

It's also probably cheaper for the government to allow the USPS to fund it's pension system delivering junk mail than it would be to directly fund the pension system.

I'd probably pay $5/month to the USPS for some sort of 'premium' mailbox to not get bulk mail delivery items to me.

I filled this out a long time ago:

https://www.dmachoice.org/

It seems to have had some effect, I don't get much junk mail.

It's listed here, it is legitimate:

http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicit...

I probably filled out some others too. It won't stop local flyers and political ads and the like, but catalog companies don't actually want to spend $0.05 sending catalogs to someones garbage bin.

Advertisers are not being subsidized. In order for them to get the cheap rates people complain about, they basically have to do half the post office's work for them. They have to sort the mail into trays, in delivery order, barcoded. Advertisement mail is also the lowest priority stuff, so it'll hang out in the post office until there's room on the truck to send it out. Without all that "spam", postage rates, and parcel rates, would be significantly higher.

Interesting on the downvotes. Someone, please make an argument why governments should provide physical mail services in 2015.

Confidentiality. It is illegal to intercept and open USPS mail.

because not everybody has easy access to the internet. Plus, packages can't be delivered digitally.

Why should government be in the business of delivering packages for private industry? Infrastructure already exists for this including UPS, Fedex, DSL.

You were possibly downvoted for repeating the myth that tax payers fund USPS.

Tax payers don't pay for the USPS. From Wikipedia:

"The USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters."

In essence, they are a highly regulated business that is hobbled by requirements (pension funding, etc.) that make them uncompetitive.

You want to make them profitable? Let them fund their pensions the way Fedex and UPS do. Let them dump the unprofitable services [delivery to Alaskan hinterlands? sorry] and charge what the market will bear.

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