Slashdot Mirror
A Blue-Sky Idea For the USPS — Postal Trucks As Sensors
An anonymous reader writes "The US Postal Service may face insolvency by 2011 (it lost $8.5 billion last year). An op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times proposes an interesting business idea for the Postal Service: use postal trucks as a giant fleet of mobile sensor platforms. [Registration-required link; this no-reg summary encapsulates the idea, as does this paper by the same author.] (Think Google Streetview on steroids.) The trucks could be outfitted with a variety of sensors (security, environmental, RF ...) and paid for by businesses. The article's author addresses some of the obvious privacy concerns that arise."
What are they gonna do? Dismantle the postal service? Just consider it infrastructure and pay for any loss from taxes. Surely the people of the US don't want to be without a postal service?
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
They've got to be very careful; most of their revenue comes from bulk mail right now. If they destroy that market, they'll be insolvent much faster. A small increase in the cost of bulk mail might be survivable; a large increase will make bulk mail unaffordable for the local pizza place, which will quit using it, leaving the postal service much further in the hole. They'd do much better by being in grocery or prescription delivery service in a large way, like cheap next day delivery of refills from your local pharmacies.
Ravnitzky suggests a variety of useful data that could be gathered by postal trucks outfitted with sensors:
detailed weather readings,
Once a day? Not useful at all. There are already tens of thousands of automated weather stations scattered across the country - I bet the author isn't aware of that.
road conditions during storms
I don't see a detailed record of how road conditions are, once a day, on mostly minor roads would help - and the state police already do this for major highways.
road quality (e.g. pothole)
This is not particularly transient - just ask the carriers to phone them in.
gaps in cellular network coverage, sources of radio frequency interference
Um... I don't see the market case, but maybe this one is at least plausible.
and in a homeland security context, detection of chemical or radiological agents.
Again - once a day?
#DeleteChrome
I was under the impression that junk mail was how the USPS made all of its money already. I suspect they've carefully considered the rates for it.
Ah but why does the postal service "need to make this trip anyway"? If you cut out all the bulk stuff, they would probably only need to send a truck once a week.
They need to make the trip every day as they have a volume of deliveries that have been sent first class. They might only have one first class delivery per street, but as that is the service they are promising when accepting a first class mail to be sent, they therefore have to "make the trip anyway" - so at that point they may as well fill the rest of the truck with crap and try to make a few bucks off it.
The point is, unless you change "first class" mail to be deliverable once per week rather than on a daily basis, you will end up driving around empty trucks each day of the week. Yes, your per item profit will be higher, but your overall net profit will be lower.
If they can indeed negotiate a "once per week" trip down a street for any mail item, I totally agree that increasing the price significantly on the junk mail will be a sound business decision, but until they do that, they are indeed likely making money by filling your mailbox with all the crap that they can shove into a truck.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
A couple of things: First, it's not your tax dollars, the USPS is not a full government agency, it's quasi-government. It's basically a private company that's wholly owned by the government, but receives no funding whatsoever and has to be self-sustaining.
Second, the USPS is already a viable business venture, except that stupid Congress keeps getting in the way. For instance, one of the reasons they're having problems now is because they need to adjust to the new market realities: the internet is taking over, and people aren't sending letters any more, so with less mail going around, it's not economical to send drivers around to every single address every day without a large enough volume of mail to deliver. This problem could be easily solved: simply cut out one or two days of deliveries (except for Express mail). However, they're not allowed to do that, because stupid Congress has mandated that they deliver mail 6 days out of the week.
The USPS needs to concentrate on the things it does well: it's a reliable way of getting things around for low cost, as long as you're not in too big a hurry. No one's going to miss receiving junk mail on Saturdays or Wednesdays (two days that could be cut). It's good for bulk mail, and also for small packages, now that people are ordering more and more stuff online. You're also more likely to receive your goods intact, as a recent Popular Mechanics article found that, in an experiment, the USPS treated packages far better than Fedex or UPS, who both subjected packages to much larger shocks, and also intentionally beat up packages marked "Fragile". The USPS just needs to concentrate on providing good, cheap, but not necessarily fast service, which is what most people want these days, and they'll be fine.