Driving the Rural Delivery Route
The U.S. Postal Service has almost 80,000 rural delivery routes serviced by some 133,000 rural letter carriers. For some of those routes, USPS provides the vehicle; for others, the carrier uses a private vehicle and receives a maintenance allowance from the Postal Service for wear and tear. In fiscal year (FY) 2020, the Postal Service paid out nearly $583 million in maintenance allowances — a rise of $71 million, or 13 percent, over FY 2015.
Not long ago, the Postal Service started converting some private-vehicle rural routes to USPS-vehicle routes, estimating the change would save $888 million over six years. For a recent audit, we reviewed a sample of these completed conversions nationwide as well as future conversions, and found that the Postal Service’s strategy for these changes was generally effective. We also discovered a few shortcomings.
For instance, maximum savings weren’t realized because USPS wasn’t implementing conversions in a timely manner, and we determined that some of the future conversions wouldn’t be the most cost-effective. We made a couple recommendations to improve the process, and Postal Service management agreed with both.
Are you a rural letter carrier, or do you know one? How does a USPS-vehicle route compare with the private-vehicle route? Does one seem more cost-effective from your point of view?
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Perhaps more time be devoted on process improvement prior to conducting audits and "pretty reports" would identify deficiencies prior to failures. Blogs such as this reveal significant factors to be addressed.prior to implementing changes. The rural carriers's comments clearly demonstrate that "one size does not fit all" and issues that need to be addressed. Patterns & trends are evident such as increased burden with delivering packages for the Amazons of this world.
With Staff shortages the demand to work 6 days a week leaves no time for vehicle maintenance and repair, they don't fix themselves!
New hires leave due to the destruction of their own vehicles running rural routes. last 3 RCA left after their cars/van had two broken struts and a cracked oil pan. The Maintenance Allowance does not cover operating and owning your private vehicle which also is useless to you for personal use once you commit to delivering mail. I would never recommend a rural RCA position to anyone.
The NGDV visually looks totally inadequate for many rural routes. it's too low to the ground, won't handle dirt, grave or snowy and icy rural roads with steap un plowed driveways.