Re:Canada Post to phase out urban home mail delivery
by graeme on Thursday December 12, 2013 @12:19AM
(#6892937)
Yes, I'd love to know the cost of delivery in my neighborhood. I live in the Plateau Mont-Royal in Montreal.
There are about 200 people on my block, based on what I could gauge from my municipal election zone. I see the postal workers quickly moving from home to home on foot.
I also fear the community mailboxes will be significantly uglier in areas such as mine, which have a combination of lovely architecture and small streets.
Re:Canada Post to phase out urban home mail delivery
by tacticus on Wednesday December 11, 2013 @10:49PM
(#6892687)
why aren't mail carriers in suburban areas given bikes or motorbikes to speed up their travel?
Auspost has a full spectrum of delivery vehicles vans and cars for remote area\parcels, postie bikes (honda ct110 (though apparently they are replacing these)) for suburban areas, bicycles for denser and trolleys and walking for dense areas
Come to Hamilton. I'll show you neighborhoods full of worn-down century homes that are under 6 figures to buy. And they don't have driveways. The next mailbox is only 20 feet away, and there's barely even a front lawn.
Compared to the gargantuan two-car-garage megalots of modern suburban sprawl, that's a huge difference. The amount of time a mail-carrier spends walking from one home to the next is important since that activity consumes most of the delivery time.
So the fact is, we used to build cities that made sense to service with mail-carriers. Then we took the brakes off of sprawl development and now it's no longer economical to do this.
I want to see a cost breakdown - what communities cost the most per-house to service with mail-carriers, and what communities cost the least. You want a fiscally sound decision? Fine, base it on cost.