USPS Office of Inspector General

It takes a lot of vehicles to move 154 billion pieces of mail each year. And a lot of fuel to power those vehicles.

While the Postal Service’s Postal Vehicle Services (PVS) fleet is a small part of the entire fleet — about 4,300 vehicles made up of cargo vans, tractors, and smaller tractor-trailers known as spotter vehicles — it is a crucial part. PVS vehicles move mail between processing facilities, inner-city delivery offices, and local businesses and mailers. Their usual travel distance is about a 50-mile radius.

As package volumes climb, so too has the U.S. Postal Service’s investments in sorting systems. Since 2015, it has deployed 33 Small Package Sorting System (SPSS) machines costing over $141 million. It intended to invest another $23 million to have seven more SPSS machines operational during the current holiday season.

It’s not only travelers that have to deal with delays at the airport. Seems inbound international mail does, too.

But the U.S. Postal Service isn’t necessarily at fault when inbound international mail is delayed. While on a plane and even after it’s unloaded but not yet tendered to the Postal Service, inbound international mail is the responsibility of the foreign postal operators and their agreements with air carriers or ground handlers.