Moving Less Mail

Filed under Mail Processing & Transportation

The Postal Service moves mail using planes, trains, trucks, cars, boats, ferries, helicopters, bicycles, hovercrafts, subways and even mules. It operates the largest civilian vehicle fleet in the world with more than 219,000 vehicles. Its fleet of trucks drives nearly 4.1 million miles and uses more than 400,000 gallons of fuel daily. To put this in perspective, when fuel costs increase by one penny, the cost to the Postal Service increases by more than $8 million annually.

The expense of providing this transportation infrastructure is staggering. In 2007, it cost the Postal Service $6.5 billion — mostly for air and highway transportation. This was an increase of 7.6 percent compared to 2006. Yet mail volume has recently suffered a sharp decline. If volume declines continue, the Postal Service could find itself operating and funding a transportation network that cannot be efficiently sustained.

How can the Postal Service’s transportation network make the best of mail volume declines? What are the most promising opportunities to reduce transportation costs? For example, should the Postal Service

Develop partnerships with other businesses that transport goods?
Reduce highway transportation routes that overlap?
Continue to eliminate underutilized trips?
Make more use of other, less costly forms of transportation such as rail or maritime?
Reduce its reliance on air transportation or shift volumes among carriers to ensure the lowest cost is obtained for responsive service?
Relax the delivery timeframe standards?

What do you think?

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28 Responses to “Moving Less Mail”

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28
K Says:
April 28th, 2010 at 9:01 pm
The OIG needs to examine transportation schedules. The closing of some BMC’s and other offices has caused trucks to not be needed but the PostaL Service has not adjusted the truck schedules. Trucks are driving empty. Many other schedules have trucks scheduled one on top of another causing the second trucks to have no mail to carry. The biggest problem is late trucks–late for no reason, then the same contractor being paid for an additional trip because the first one caused late dispatch.
27
John Says:
December 15th, 2009 at 2:57 am
I think the postal should do ALL of the things mentioned in the original post. Why is it even an issue? Heck, if we could trust people, we could also use every day citizens to move bulk mail.
26
snoop Says:
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Using the numbers above, a 1 cent increase in fuel is actually $1.25 million per year, not $8m. The bigger question is why is the fleet using vehicles that get 10.5 mpg. The average truck in your fleet does about 19 miles per day, which makes it the perfect candidate for electric. Phoenix Motors and Coda Automotive would be good fits for the USPS.
25
Anonymous Says:
February 7th, 2009 at 3:41 am
i get the wrong mail many times a month.
24
Wendy Randall Says:
February 6th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
I agree that Saturday would be the day to drop.
23
bmeu clerk Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Drop shipping first class isn’t the answer. Being lean and mean, developing new products, and reducing the size of the company are what is important. Service, service, service, like location, location, location. If we don’t provide the service, people will pay more to our competitor because service is number one. The non reliability of package delivery has me thinking about switching over to our competitor.
22
sbalduff Says:
January 15th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
I think the Postal Service needs to take advantage of the fact that they visit, or at least pass every house every day. From utility companies needing meters to be read to marketing companies wanting to know the type of car parked in the driveway. I believe the Postal Service could provide valuable information to companies who would be willing to pay for this type of service.
21
rmit Says:
January 15th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Dropship FCM has been thought of many times by many people over many years. It is anathema to USPS. But as a larger and larger proportion of the mail is sent by large, sophisticated mailers, and as these mailers become more effective in what they can do, the issue just becomes more important.

The opposition is probably three fold. First, it does not want a nationwide network with v. little mail on it. Second, it does not want to face the unions who do not want a reduction in employment levels. Third, heads of large organizations usually feel like bigger is better–I want many people reporting to me, I want a bigger staff, I want more power, I want more influence, and so on.

The problem is that none of these reasons are any good, particularly in the long run. The discounts would probably be small at first and would be based on avoidable costs. If you can avoid 2.5 cents and you give a discount of 1 cent, then you save 1.5 cents each time a piece becomes dropshipped. The network has to be adjusted over time. Further, some studies show diseconomies of scale, so a smaller, tighter network might even be better. As far as labor goes, we don’t need constraints that are essentially make-work schemes. It has been understood for 100 years that an economy does not advance by keeping jobs that are not needed. As far as wanting a bigger staff goes, that is a bad reason from the start.

Different people have different versions of how we got started on other kinds of worksharing. The truth probably is that the Rate Commission pushed it and the Postal Service came in kicking and screaming. Now, however, the Postal Service takes credit for it and points out how much better off we are with it.