The thought of mail traveling by rail conjures up a picture of railway mail clerks sorting letters as a train rolls along into the night. Traditional railway mail service ended long ago, fading away as the use of passenger rail diminished and new methods of sorting mail by machine arose. The last run of a Railway Post Office was in 1977.
The U.S. Postal Service has approximately 300 mail processing facilities. Some of these facilities perform better than others, some perform worse, and some struggle to reach even average performance. Our auditors examined 10 historically low performing facilities to find out why.
According to a recent estimate from the American Trucking Associations, there was a shortage of 80,000 truck drivers in 2021. The pandemic worsened an already existing shortage, impacting a number of industries, from retail to manufacturing . . . to mail.
Truck drivers are an essential part of the Postal Service’s transportation network. The Postal Service relies on over 9,000 USPS-employed drivers and thousands of contractors to move millions of mailpieces each day across the nation’s highways, between processing facilities, as well as to and from post offices.
