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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.
The easiest thing to do would be to greatly increase the rate for "Junk Mail" (4th class mail or whatever they call it). That "bulk rate pre-metered" stuff that costs next to nothing for a business to send, but still must be routed and delivered just like the payments I mail. I just throw it all away, and I imagine most people do the same. If it is really worth it to send, companies can pay closer to what the normal public pays. This would reduce the annoyance for folks at home while lowering the volume of mail (and raising the per item profit).
I think the idea seeks to solve the problem of falling revenue. Selling data collected by sensors could be a potential revenue stream.
The AntiJoey
Deliver Route 1, deliver Mo-We-Fr on Week 1, and Tu-Th-Sa on Week 2. On Route 2, do the opposite.
One carrier then can take care of 2 routes, cutting the workforce, vehicles, gas, and vehicle maintenance needed quite significantly. Make exceptions only for Express Mail, which is rare to Residential Addresses anyway.
Nothing in the summary states this would be the case. Let the other govt agencies and entities pay for these sensors in return for the data. They'd pay the USPS for allowing the devices to be on the vehicles in the first place. The USPS pays nothing, and makes a little extra cash on the side.
The postal service is going to be insolvent because the service they provide isn't worth the cost. If it was, people would pay a higher price for it. At the time that the constitution was written, it was pretty much the state of the art communication channel and it made some sense for it to be singled out as necessary along with post roads etc. Today, things are different. Most people don't use snail mail to communicate so it doesn't make sense to keep it the way it is. The modern day equivalent of the postal service's role in the late 1700's is broadband last mile infrastructure.
A few years back in the employ of one of the big-5 consultancies, I proposed a virtual post office box system for Australia Post. Nice option for the user, a single PO box that just had a permanent re-direct to wherever the person lived at the moment. Proposal got all the way up to the exec.
"Great idea! But letter volume has gone down the toilet. Thank you for coming."
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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
"detection of chemical or radiological agents"??? like, someone could detonate a nuclear bomb in NYC and no-one would notice except the postman?
-Evening hours to make it easier to ship (i.e. easier to hand them MONEY!)
-Drop Tuesday/Thursday mail delivery.
-Switch to Hybrid trucks, as their driving habits are about as ideal as it comes for a hybrid rig (low speed, lots of start/stop driving).
-Offer a "Spam" blocker service as a subscription to stop junk mail for a fee.
-Make their package tracking actually track packages, not just magically go from "In Transit" to "Delivered".
-Contract with Google to put cameras on top for nearly daily updates to Google Maps Streetview.
More distopian:
-Use lobbyists to subvert things so that email/online cannot be legally used to conduct business.
-Figure out how to be another "Too Big To Fail" organization.
Why don't they charge 5x more for advertisements? I get these crap coupon wads of paper like three times a week and it all goes right into the trash. Not to mention the dumb ass Charter love letters begging me to come back. I don't want my inbox or mailbox stuffed full of advertisements. We can't stop spam so we should at least be able to stop the snail mail right?
Certainly the cost of delivery should reflect on the postage.
Let's say there is a house 5 miles away from the post office in its own secluded neighborhood, and the road's speed limit is 20 mph. It takes 15 minutes to drive there, and 15 minutes to drive back, for a total of 30 minutes. At a pay rate of $50k/yr, that's about $24 an hour. The total cost of that delivery, assuming there is only one first class mail in the truck for that house, is $12. The postage you pay right now for a first class mail is 44 cents.
To be profitable, USPS would have to save enough letters and packages for this house and deliver a large batch. Someone in this household can choose to pick up mail from the postoffice sooner, or will have to wait for a few days for more mail to come. At the rate I receive mail, it would probably take a month to accumulate that much mail.
The telecom industry knows this as the last mile problem. I see no exemption for USPS.
I once had a signature.
The problem with the USPS is that it while it is not funded by the Federal Government, it is controlled by it. This quasi-enterprise status is completely impractical.
To illustrate the issue the USPS has massive overcapacity for the service level it provides. Any business faced with this would consolidate or downsize in order to save money. Unfortunately Congress won't let them do it. Any time the USPS wants to close a branch, the people living in the immediate area protest to their Congresscritter who then blocks it. The result is gross inefficiency.
If it were possible to slap the Congress upside the head on this issue the USPS would have a chance. Right now it doesn't.
The post office is going to lose money because unlike UPS, they can't raise rates. They have to visit everyone's house 6 days a week.
It's actually a very very efficient organization. It's the constraints put upon it that make it so that it loses money. Congress won't allow this cost saving, Congress won't allow to cut service. Congress won't allow it to raise rates.
If you know anyone that's a postal carrier, you know it's a stressful job. Hence the term, going postal.
If the service benefits most US taxpayers. Besides which, if I were going to spend a fortune on sensors, I'd put them on garbage trucks instead. You *know* the garbage is getting picked up, but the mail truck doesn't necessarily go everywhere, all the time
Congratulations, you've just described exactly how the USPS works.
Bajillions of people who live in rural areas (like me) pick up their mail at the post office, because the cost of delivery to their homes is prohibitive. Universal service is not, in fact, universal, and never has been. Even UPS won't deliver to my house—I've got to pick up their packages at the post office (!), too.
Also, your example is ludicrous. Have you ever heard of a house so isolated that it's in a "neighborhood" (?) five miles away and yet, mysteriously, this five-mile-long stretch of road, devoid of any homes or businesses, has a 20 MPH speed limit on its road? Because I can't summon any scenario in which that would be the case.
Login link? Where?
Anybody want my mod points?
I read an article a while back about a company developing a system that can pull together CCTV feeds from a number of sources to produce a time-stamped street view. They indicated that a potential source of data collection would be to put GPS correlated cameras on service vehicles, such as buses and garbage trucks. (I imagine USPS trucks would work here.)
The output of such a system was a map-like user interface. Think Google Earth/Street View, but where you can ask it "OK, but show me the same place this time yesterday," and the system works out the best way to show you what you want.
The 'Wanted' posters at the post office...
You're there, you got your package, you're trying to mail something, this guy's wanted in 12 states.
Yeah, now what? Ok.
I check the guy standing in line behind me...
if it's not him, that's pretty much all I can do.
I don't understand. We all know that people increasingly use email instead of letters and Facebook et. al. instead of sending pictures or post cards. People bank on the web and don't need to send paper checks anymore. Why not simply shrink the post office if the demand's not there. Surely we can find other more intelligent things for the former postal workers to do!
Then some *private* company is welcome to build a fleet of sensors and sell the data.
any magazine that offers the occupant something for sale then the USPS should be able to charge extra for the delivery of that advertising (junk mail) i have a grocery sack of junk-mail magazines waiting to be recycled and its all pulp spam to me, buy one item 5 years ago and they all share your address and spam your snail mail box for the rest of your life.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I think we all know that the postal services is not going away. They will increase fees and get more from the tax payers. Hopefully, they will make good decisions, and perhaps someone should tell them that people are sending more emails than mail...in case they didn't get the memo. I would also suggest that some might be sending more written letters than emails since the wiki leaks. There has got to be more than one company or agency that is now sending a few more paper items because of that.
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Worked great on The Apprentice.
All the USPO is at this point is a junk mail distributor. Mail has been by and large replaced by email. They duplicate efforts of private companies that could easily fill any gap they would leave behind. The $8.5 billion loss is the tip of the iceberg if we consider unfunded pension liabilities.
Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.
They should close some of their excess branches. In rural areas/small towns where people might raise more of a stink, make the USPS an in-store mini-office at the nearest grocery store. If banks manage to have secure in-store branches, I imagine the USPS can figure it out too.
The following paper demonstrates that the current system of funding the Postal Service’s Civil Service Retirement System pension responsibility is inequitable and has resulted in the Postal Service overpaying $75 billion to the pension fund.
The postal service is having money extracted from it each year, channeled to other parts of the federal government pension systems (mostly military). This is to help disguise how bad the federal budget is overdrawn. If the post office were allowed to fund their peoples' pensions the way every other government agency is, they'd be showing a profit.
Don't you think this point of view is just a wee bit convoluted... I mean its all your tax dollars, whether or not its the USPS or some other government agency choosing to foot the bill.
Determine if this is indeed a viable side business (and I assert it is). The fleet of USPS vehicles is potentially a superb resource because they travel to virtually all roads and to every person who receives mail at a mailbox once a day. Collecting sensor and (broad spectrum) photographic information, could prove useful for anything from locating "Gang Bangers" to analyzing the effects of climate change on native vegetation. Such a bank of environmental information would certainly become an invaluable resource. Since the information is collected on the "People's Dime", the information should belong to the people and be made available to government agencies, businesses, schools, and private citizens. As well the privacy and security of "The People" must be secured whenever possible, so as to limit access to people, or their residences to extraordinary circumstances with extensive legal checks and balances. Having this much information collected about John Q. Public's day to day existence would necessitate some kind of extensive policy on the collection and utilization of third party public information (i.e. business video, phone and Wifi interception, urban microphones, aerial and satellite surveillance of public spaces, etc.) To date this collection has been heavily weighted to the benefit of business and government, and against common privacy. The nation needs to address this now before things spiral completely out of control (and the wholesale convincing of the American people to abdicate their civil rights by shaking the terrorist boogie-man at them "booga-booga" needs to come to a crashing halt!!!)
The goal should be to obtain the value and power of an accurate, timely, and comprehensive national data-set, without giving Big Brother the keys to the kingdom. In the end, the only issue is what value does this information provide, what with it cost us in time, money and most of all personal privacy. As a distant incentive, it might make the USPS a viable business venture, but it hardly seems significant considering the titanic social issues concerned.
Get with the times: the USPS receives $0 of your tax dollars and that's been the case since the 60s. While not truly private - if it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 26th in the 2008 Fortune 500 - the USPS operates as a government regulated monopoly, which by statute is not permitted to make a profit. Thus sudden changes in the price of fuels, changes in First Class habits, rises in the price of paper often hit the USPS hard because there is no cash on which to fall back.
They certainly are. Or they can rent space on an existing infrastructure.
The AntiJoey
Actually, no.
The post office can deliver onto private property.
In fact, believe it or not, it can't be kept out by property owners if a resident wants their mail delivered somewhere. If someone wants their mail delivered inside of a locked apartment building, or even a college dorm that doesn't allow non-residents, and the post office wants to deliver there, the owner of the building cannot keep them out.
In short, if they have a letter for you, and you want them to deliver it to you at a location, and they want to deliver it at that location, they technically can demand to be let through whatever locked doors they want to deliver it to that location, regardless of whose property that is.
This is all mostly moot because the post office doesn't want to deliver mail in such a manner, though, that would be insane. It will often demand that people put up mailboxes on the public right away if they want delivery, and would certainly look long and hard before deciding to deliver mail on private property against someone's wishes.
But it raises an interesting legal point if postal employees are used for anything else while delivering mail.
But we're talking about putting them on postal vehicles, which operate 99.99999% on public roads, and it would be a simple matter to leave them off any vehicles that leave them.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Both sides of my family are from Vermont—Rutland, on one side, and the White River Junction area, on the other. I've spent a lot of time there, and I think I'm about as familiar as somebody who doesn't live there could reasonably be. And I can say that with fair confidence that Vermont's rural areas are no more rural or isolated than the rural areas of Virginia, where I live. (Compare Vermont's population density and Virginia's population density. While you're at it, compare the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Green Mountains. If you were blindfolded and kidnapped, when the blindfold was taken off, you'd be hard pressed to know if you were in Vermont or Virginia.) Good luck finding any USPS address that has no other USPS address within five miles.
And I'm not at all frustrated about the lack of universal postal service—it's no problem for me at all, having been the case for me for much of my life.
Then some *private* company...
Like the USPS?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
The post office nearest my house (14610) is used to capacity, perhaps even a bit understaffed relative to the lines.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The rates in Canada are around 60 cents per letter. Actually 57cents plus federal and provincial taxes. We let the post office make a profit so that far away places like the frozen north can have regular delivery.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
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.
Military pension rates haven't applied to the post office in years.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
Amen.
I would cut normal mail delivery to three days a week - Monday, Wednesday, Friday. If a holiday falls on one of those days, that week is Tuesday - Thursday - Saturday.
I said this to my mom - who is in her late 60's - and she was aghast. She just couldn't imagine not getting mail every day.
My wife and I get almost nothing worth having via mail - all the bills come in via email, and I pay them electronically, either by push from my bank or pull from the vendor. A lot of the mail goes directly into the recycle bin before I even hit the house.
When I ship a package it's a mix of price and convenience. UPS is actually the most convenient for me - going past their local facility is barely out of my way home from work - but USPS is cheaper. But I almost never care about what day it gets there.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
I have had this idea for a long time for the postal service to both make and save money. I would pay a small monthly fee for the post office to NOT deliver my mail.
Specifically, I want a virtual PO Box. All my mail would go to a processing center where the front and back of each item is scanned, OCRed, and placed on a web site where I can look at it all. I can then direct them to send or shred any individual item. Because the return address, etc, is OCRed, I can also set up filters for mail I want automatically delivered, like bills.
I don't have the deal with the hassle of sorting through and recycling junk mail, the post office makes some extra money, and they save money by having to deliver less mail. Direct marketers might not like it, but maybe they could be notified of send or shred decisions and can use it to help cull their mailing lists.
I keep seeing people talking about privatizing the USPS and comparing it to UPS/FedEx -- the problem with those comparisons is that UPS and FedEx don't deliver mail. I have a feeling that if you cut out all the 4th through 1st class non-package mail, the USPS would be pretty damned profitable; it's the sorting and delivery of thousands of irregular piles of paper that's a killer.
Well, that and the fact that the USPS is ludicrously cheap for what you get -- check out the comparison chart from earlier this year at Postal Sanity (http://postalsanity.com/2010/07/u-s-postal-rates-excel-in-international-comparison/).
Exactly. I only disagree about UPS; every time I check their prices, they're much higher than Fedex. I do have a shipping account with Fedex though which makes it even cheaper, but for anything under 5 pounds, USPS is always the cheapest. And Fedex places (usually Kinko's) are always convenient for me, but my post office is only 1/2 mile away.
I get some deliveries by the mail (online orders), so that, and Netflix DVDs, are all I really care about receiving the mail for. If they cut out days, I wouldn't notice, except occassionally I might not have a Netflix DVD that day, but then I'll just watch one of the instant movies (if they had all their movies available online, I wouldn't even bother with the DVDs).
as long as you're an executive. Carly Fiorina ran HP into the ground. I don't see her collecting unemployment checks.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
She ran HP into the ground in terms of dismantling momentum. But it doesn't mean that she can do that forever without repercussion the way an arm of the government can.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
UPS won't send a postcard from Alaska to Florida for 28 cents, either.
After losing many billions of dollars, it would appear the USPS cannot do that either.
Just because it costs you 28 cents does not mean that's what it actually costs to transport.
Is it really fair that four other people paid to send your postcard? Why should you not pay the real costs?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Perhaps they could talk to Australia Post about how they achieved a profit in these challenging times.
USPS is a world class organization. Nonsensical privatization or selling off, or unnecessary opening up will kill one of the best institutions of USA. I have used Postal Services in USA, Japan, Canada, India, UK and many other countries. The level of service and professionalism of USPS is world class.
Tat Tvam Asi
A few years ago it occurred to me that you could utilize an existing fleet of delivery vehicles suck as the USPS, UPS, or FEDX for applications like Google Street View.
You would negotiate with the controlling organization to mount your sensor/camera array on each vehicle, and remotely collect the data.
The cool thing was, if there's a particular street that hasn't gotten coverage, you can simply send an empty package to an address at the end of the street as a way of ensuring that one of the trucks visits that address.
G.
I hadn't clearly noticed the contradiction before: Mail is not considered a priority and has no specified delivery time, yet the come by 6 days a week. I'm all for skipping Wednesday or Saturday or both. I'm also all about charging more for bulk - since that is the majority of what shows up.
With the USPS' help, we'll finallay locate Hogan's radio transmitter! The ball-bearing plant in Schwienfurt will finally be safe!
Yeah a private company like the USPS with "sovereign immunity, eminent domain powers, powers to negotiate postal treaties with foreign nations, and an exclusive legal right to deliver first-class and third-class mail." (Wikipedia).
Sound like many private companies you know?
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.
Serious question: What's this? A lot of people say the USPS is totally self-funded but then why do they request funding from Congress every year? Is that considered a separate organization within the USPS or something?
It's good for bulk mail, and also for small packages, now that people are ordering more and more stuff online.
I think they should start accepting larger packages, if anything. They're becoming increasingly irrelevant, and they can't seem to compete on price for anything but letters (which I never send).
Serious question: What's this? [usps.com] A lot of people say the USPS is totally self-funded but then why do they request funding from Congress every year? Is that considered a separate organization within the USPS or something?
The blind and oversea voting and Revenue Forgone Reform Act (Which is lower postal rates for charities) are stuff that, for whatever reason, Congress has decided the post office should do for free or cheap, and Congress pays them each year for that. The Post Office is only self-supporting for normal stuff, Congress had it do charity work that Congress pays for.
The 'reconciliation' stuff is them getting their money back from money they had left over at the end of previous years and 'loaned' to the government. Presumably because there's a recession and it needs the money because profits are down. And, as the article points out, it doesn't have a lot money left 'in the bank'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
... how about raising postage just enough so it makes $0.01 a year. It'll still beat the living hell out of UPS and FedEx for mailing a letter.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Mail is a pain in the buttocks for me. With mail, you're supposed to go outside and CHECK it, even if you don't expect there to be anything since someone MIGHT send you something, and you don't want it to get wet. The postal carriers never close the door, so whatever is inside WILL get soaked by the rain.
Try one of these, recommended by another poster here. That should solve your water problems.
And then I need to decorate my mailbox with Christmas lights and keep them lit ALL winter or the plow obliterates it without fail. Reflectors don't do it. It has to be lit Christmas lights.
Where the hell do you live? Someplace with 20-foot snow drifts?
And it's a REAL pain to buy stamps. I rarely have to send anything by mail, but when I do, I usually have to buy a book of stamps. Unless I remember to get Forever stamps which I THINK don't expire, If I have any in my wallet, they are probably out of date. I end up using two . Sometimes I use two because I DON'T KNOW how much a stamp costs.
Now you're just being ridiculous. Yes, Forever stamps don't expire. That's why they're called "forever". Just buy those, and use ONE, unless your letter weighs more than one ounce. Seriously, it's not that hard. They even have automated machines in POs now that will weigh your letter and print exact postage for you.
The post office in my town is open from just after I need to be at work to just before I get home from work. Convenient!
Every small business is like that. Only megastores like Wal-Mart have extended hours, especially in rural areas.
And they won't get a stamp vending machine to put in the unlocked lobby with the PO boxen because in the words of the person behind the counter last time I had to purchase stamps, 'It's not as efficient'.
All the POs around here have removed their vending machines, and replaced them with (I can't recall their name for them at the moment) automated machines that let you weigh packages or letters and print exact postage, and pay using a debit or credit card. They're really handy, they're available at all hours (only the counter part of the PO is locked up at night), and if more people would use them, the lines wouldn't be as long.
If your PO doesn't have those, you should complain.
And neither has it been really regulated for the last 30 years.
Look at the FCC ruling yesterday. They barley passed weak Net Neutrality rules which are not likely to last more than 6 months when the new Republicans come into ofice.
Technically, the Teleco/Cableco system we have is NOT free market and it is NOT regulated. It is callen an Oligopy. There are about 6 large companies with very well established and stable geographic regions. These companies cooperate to maintain the status quo while marginally competing on the technical services offered at the perimeter.
Telecom companies are a power to themselves because the last 30 years moved to fast for government (and almost everyone else) to keep up and we also starved the regulators of the resources needed to actually regulate the giants.