A friend of mine delivered for Canada Post.

A few years ago, exiting the vehicle on the left side to come around to the curb, he was struck by a car in a hit and run (they never caught the driver). Spent 6 months in hospital learning to walk again, and while he’s since somewhat recovered, he’s going to spend the rest of his life living in significant pain.

Not having to exit into the road, when the job involves people exiting the vehicles hundreds of thousands of times per year, matters a lot for the long-term safety of the delivery force.

I'd wager ~75% of mailboxes are delivered to with a RHD vehicle. So it matters a lot.

TIL, thanks. Maybe it's different for rural areas, but here in (sub)urban Canada postal workers hit a few houses at a time (and you can tell because most of them wear comfortable walking shoes too). I just looked it up and it seems like their new electric vehicles aren't RHD either, would be curious to know how that decision transpired :)

It does depend on locale. In US cities where there's some density the postal worker will usually leave their truck (which is often a regular, non-custom, mid-size box truck) at the end of a street, fill up a wheeled bag, and walk to several buildings with the bag to drop things off, before returning to the truck and moving to the next location.

But in most suburbs (which is a lot of the US), at least where there are mailboxes at the curb (and not mail slots on houses), the postal worker will just drive from mailbox to mailbox, dropping mail as they go, never leaving the vehicle, only getting out of their seat when they need to add more mail to the box sitting next to them.

I heard a few years ago that Canada Post was forcing everyone to use a communal mailbox at a semi-central location close to their house, even in fairly rural areas. If that's the case, it'd also make a lot more sense to just have a normal van, IMO.

I think that plan may have been axed, as (anecdotally) the number of communal mailboxes seems to be relatively low among the few cities I've visited/lived in over the past couple of years. Also anecdotally, I'm not sure why the majority of houses (in the burbs) seem to have a mailbox by the door or a mail slot instead of box by the curb. They definitely exist, but feel like a minority outside of rural areas.

On all but urban routes US mail carriers never get out of their vehicles, unless they have something too big to fit in the box.

In the NY suburb I grew up in, we had a mailbox attached to our house, not at the street. The house was set back from the road about 50 feet. The mail carrier would park their car, fill up a messenger bag, and walk around to a few houses and drop off the mail. Then they'd return to their car, move down the street a bit, and repeat. It was quite a bit of walking for the postal worker.

For 165,000 vehicles that will be used for a long time, it probably doesn't matter a great deal.

I don't mean that it doesn't matter at all, the procurement process needs to make sense and not be a path for graft, but there's reasonable volume there to spread fixed costs across.

RHD is pretty common. That's how all vehicles sold in the UK, Japan, and Australia (and some other places) are sold.

There there are conversion kits for common rural postal vehicles (jeeps)

You can buy right-drive jeep wranglers new in the US today, even. They aren't real common but can be ordered.

Not to mention India