I used to live in a small mountain town. The official vehicles were ancient so any time there was snow I'd see the carriers in Tacomas or Jeeps with a magnetic US Mail decal on the side. They also modified their routes slightly to accommodate left side steering wheels.

Don't all cars in the us have the steering wheel on the left??

Why would you need to modify the route for that???

Official USPS trucks are right steer, to put the driver on the same side of the car as the mailboxes on a normal street

No - there's a surprising number of "classic" British cars that are kicking about the US as collectables.

https://www.beverlyhillscarclub.com/1964-rolls-royce-silver-...

Interestingly a mate back in the 90s used to g to the US from Australia and ship back container loads of classic British cars and car parts sourced cheap in the US at a time when that fad was on the wane there and bargains could be had that sold for a good markup in Australia.

Mail delivery trucks have the steering wheel on the right side so that the driver doesn't have to get out in order to reach the mailbox. When using normal cars, they're modifying the routes slightly.

We get this in the UK with other parcel carriers.

My regular delivery man used to have some kei sized thing with a roof box filled to the gunnels with boxes.

He has now invested in a larger car.

Regarding your aside, isn’t that what a parcel locker is for?

I presume you have these in the US?

I am not in the US, Though I do have a parcel locker downstairs. But most of the time something will arrive at the shipping center the previous evening of the ship date.

So there's a thing of me wanting to be able to go over there and get it ASAP if I want it, and also not needing for somebody to come to me to give it to me (it's close enough to me to not warrant that anyways!).

I understand legitimate needs (or wants) for people to get things hand delivered. I just feel that I am able and willing to just go pick stuff up myself by default.

Similarly - I'd be happy to get all my parcels just once a week - most of the things I order aren't urgent and I'm likely to not be around to receive the parcel anyway.

There is a tension between regularity of delivery and logistics. If you have things happening once a week, then you're asking yourself "which day of the week". It can't really be all the same day of the week (now you're looking at delivering 7x more packages that one day), but even if you distribute it all on a fixed day per address then people will still have times that they want things.

In a magical world post offices would have some sort of mechanism like just texting people that a package might arrive on a certain date, and maybe you can hit a button to request earlier delivery. Unfortunately the existence of that button requires restraint from the general population to be of any utility (and charging for the button press is a bit gnarly).

Perhaps in rural populations, people would be more reasonable though (especially if downstream of this system you actually had deliveries happen _when they are predicted to_)

It can be done better than today. If I order 3 packages on bol.com,I tend to see 3 delivery vans on the same day,sometimes literally parked behind each other. Or they spread out to 3 consequent days. Or the neighbour gets a delivery van half an hour later. They're mostly from the same company (bpost)

I'd like to tell them: Pick a day next week, and deliver everything together at the same time. Make it a bit more expensive to let the customer choose, and market forces will balance things out.

It could done behind the scenes, although I don't know how much space a typical post office has for storing mail for an extra day or five.

They could hold off delivering to a group of addresses (a street or an apartment building) until they either have a priority letter, for which a premium has been charged, or a non-priority letter is reaching the deadline, which here is 5 days. At that point they deliver everything that's waiting.

Recently the postal service awarded vehicle replacement to a defense contractor (Oshkosh) who knows how to win government contracts but absolutely nothing about building reliable fuel efficiency vehicles. They are fine for the military when making things like trucks which can haul tanks around but an insane choice for building delivery vehicles. The post office could have easily gone with something like the Ford transit which has a known warranty profile and existing history and endless engineering put into it. Instead the post office is going to end up with a low volume turd made by a defense contractor with no experience making daily use vehicles. Government decision making is bonkers because they put ridiculous requirements in contracts, rather than just thinking logically about the most cost effective way to deliver Americans their mail.

The contractor will use Fords.

This shouldn't be too surprising. Doing government contracting isn't easy, so certain companies get really good at it, while others simply decline government work because it's too much hassle. That's why there's very little crossover between government contracting companies and other companies: companies that make stuff for the government generally don't make anything else, and companies that are successful in other places don't generally make anything for the government. There are a few exceptions, with the most notable one probably being Boeing (makes both military and civilian aircraft), and also Honeywell.

Honestly, it makes perfect sense fo the USPS to go with a "low-volume turd": they apparently don't want something off-the-shelf, they want something custom for their unique needs. Who's going to build this for them other than a government contractor? You mention the Ford Transit, but the steering wheel is on the wrong side and it probably has some other problems since it isn't specifically designed as a mail truck. You might suggest here that they could contract with Ford to make a custom version, but look above at what I wrote: most companies have no interest in this, and will simply turn down any government contracts, and I imagine Ford is the same way. Why deal with the hassle? For most companies, it's simply not worth it, otherwise they would be actively bidding on government contracts. So a Ford vehicle probably simply isn't an option here, and the USPS's only options are low-volume turds made by defense contractors.

"Really surprised at how rural postmen are using their own cars."

In rural areas independent people bid for routes. So they provide their own vehicle and are independent contractors.

Correct - which is effectively the same model employed by FedEx Ground, for what it's worth.

> I'm fine picking things up, just tell me when they arrive at the sorting center.

I have lived in a couple of places (in Europe) where I often had to go to the sorting center to retrieve parcels, due to some customs-related issue or whatever. Staff generally weren’t happy to see me there. The sorting centers didn’t employ dedicated customer-facing staff, because there just aren’t enough customers coming in. And that means that I was either distracting someone from the tasks they are usually assigned, or I was at least shattering the peaceful environment that they normally work in.

I guess it depends on the place, in Tokyo at least there's a dedicated pickup counter at the post office for stuff. Other delivery services it's a bit more chaotic (the sorting centers being basically glorified garages with stuff stacked all over the place).

There's a sort of comforting chaos to deliveries in the downtown area. There are loads of small centers, deliveries happen on foot for the major delivery companies in many cases (people just pushing around carts). And the missed delivery slips just have the cell phone number of the delivery person that you can call and be like "yeah whenever's good for you, I'm home again". I imagine all the fancy logistics happens right up to the delivery centers, and then it's basically YOLO mode.

> I'm fine picking things up

If you know it's being delivered through USPS, have it delivered to 'general delivery'[1]. Problem is Amazon and many others don't let you choose your shipper and most post offices (reasonably so) don't accept general delivery from 3rd party carriers.

Alternatively, ship it to a UPS store that offers 'Package Acceptance' service. They charge per-package - usually $5-$7 though I've seen some as high as $15. Or you could open a UPS POBox if you receive enough packages to make it worth the cost.

[1] https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-General-Delivery