Driving Into The Future

A little love for the Post Office and its new trucks

I want to write today about the new Post Office delivery truck that was just officially unveiled the other day. The Post Office is something I occasionally touch on in my writing. I’ve featured a few post offices here before when I look at what old buildings used to be (both post offices in previous buildings and old post offices which are home to new enterprises.) And the smallest post office in America.

A few years ago, I also wrote a piece titled “Why We Should Love the Post Office,” addressed to a conservative audience. I wrote:

The Post Office is a frequent punching bag for pundits of varied political persuasions and for ordinary customers too: it cuts crony deals, it bankrupts itself, it’s too expensive, it’s too cheap, the workers are too lazy, it subsidizes far-flung low-density living arrangements, it’s a dinosaur from a vanished age of centralization and bigness. Critiques flow in from libertarians, finance hawks, consumer advocates, environmentalists. One wag cautions against privatization of the Post Office like so: its “ongoing existence as a government-operated monopoly is a constant reminder to the electorate of the impressive incompetence that is government itself.”

And:

While many large chains are pulling out of rural America and poor urban America, leaving people with long, lonely drives for groceries or complicated trips on public transit, the USPS, for now, remains nearly everywhere. If America were the world, the sun would never set on the Post Office. In the tough post-2008 years, they toyed with closing low-traffic rural branches, but decided to cut operating hours instead, with some consolidation of branches in more densely populated places. USPS delivers packages everywhere and operates thousands of tiny, low-traffic locations.

When you consider how much work it takes to get a letter from coast to coast, and that a stamp costs the same no matter where in the U.S. the letter goes, it’s nothing short of remarkable. It is also terribly inefficient. And extremely egalitarian.

Yeah…maybe “inefficient but egalitarian” isn’t exactly a conservative priority. But my deeper point was that there’s something civic and just plain American about the Post Office. It isn’t a corrupt public-private partnership. It isn’t a welfare or entitlement program. It’s a quasi-business that also has a mandate to make sure every American has access to the mail. There’s something almost quaint about that these days, when so much information is digital and so much physical mail is junk. But it’s the kind of thing a pure market probably wouldn’t produce, and that we’ll miss if it’s gone. That’s the sort of thing a genuine conservatism should understand.

Anyway, the new vehicles are interesting. Most of them will be electric, which is cool and at this point seems pretty well tested (I expect they’ve considered things like loss of battery range in cold weather or after a few years, and will be able to maintain the vehicles throughout those things).

If you think it’s just a gimmick, here’s a good argument for why it’s maybe even a better idea than electric cars in general:

Mail trucks are almost the perfect use case for electric vehicles. They run on fixed routes from a single point. They start and stop a lot, which allows for regenerative braking to top up batteries. With fewer moving parts, they require less maintenance. And they’re quiet, making them a more acceptable presence in neighborhoods.

Here’s a bit on them from one news story. I did not know the old ones lacked air conditioning!