there it is again, like yesterday and last week and seven years ago. “neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night” prevents your loyal postman from making his daily rounds in his light blue shirt, gray shorts, and the occasional awesome safari hat. but how exactly did his trusted mail carrier get assigned this specific route and how long did he stay with her?
According to Sue Brennan of the United States Postal Service, your carrier’s route is one of more than 74,000 rural postal routes and nearly 145,000 urban routes across the country. America’s longest single route is in Mangum, Oklahoma, where a busy rural carrier drives 182.75 miles (294 kilometers) a day serving 248 customers. The shortest route is in Athens, Georgia, where an urban carrier walks 950 feet (289 meters) to make 281 deliveries.
Brian Renfroe is a second-generation mail carrier from Hattiesburg, Mississippi who currently serves as Executive Vice President of the National Association of Letter Carriers, a union representing the 200,000 postal workers in America’s cities. renfroe is happy to explain the process by which an individual postal route is designed and assigned.
For starters, Renfroe says, rural carriers and urban carriers have different systems for determining the size of a route. A rural carrier’s route is much more consistent and you are paid for the amount of time it takes to complete the route. For urban carriers, the guiding principle of route design is for a carrier to complete the route in as close to eight hours as possible.
As you can imagine, an eight-hour ride looks very different depending on your location. in a dense urban center filled with high-rise apartments, it can take eight hours for a postal worker to service a couple of blocks. in the suburbs, another postal worker could walk and drive for miles delivering to hundreds of single-family homes.
The size and dimensions of each route are calculated using a combination of computer-based mapping software and traditional field experience.
“The postal service has a computer program that maps the exact location of each delivery point. Not just ‘this house is here,’ but where the mailbox is,” Renfroe says. “and this program uses a series of algorithms to try to generate the most efficient way to travel the route based on the value of time that is assigned to each street.”
The computer path time is just a starting point. So it’s the postal manager’s job to “account for reality,” says Renfroe, which includes all the variables that can affect the time it takes to complete a route. there are seasonal fluctuations in mail volume. there is bad weather. there’s road building and new house building and the very human differences between one carrier and the next.
“Some mail carriers are tall, some are short, some are young, some are older, some are faster, some are slower,” says Renfroe. “There are all sorts of variables involved.”
There is no set schedule for delivering mail to a particular house. the postman has to spend a few hours sorting the mail into trays before setting out on his route. the trays correspond to the order of the route. If the houses ahead of you on the route have more mail than usual on one day, the letters may arrive at your mailbox later than another day, even if the weather is good and there are no road works or other delays.
keeping routes as close to eight hours as possible requires regular adjustments. postal administrators will conduct six-day route inspections to precisely time every part of the mail carrier’s day, from daily sorting in the morning to street delivery and overnight bag hanging.
If a carrier’s day approaches eight and a half hours, the postal administrator will split a portion of their route and spread it out to nearby carriers with lighter loads. That explains why you might see a new face on your route every two years.
otherwise, routing at any post office is done by seniority. when a route is vacated (carrier resigns or withdraws) or a new one is created, all carriers in the office can bid on the route. The longest serving carrier wins. if you’ve had the same carrier for a long time, that probably means it’s part of a desirable route. or those cookies you give him on National Postal Worker Day (July 1) are paying off.
In addition to long-term routing adjustments that are made every few months or years, the postal service also makes short-term routing corrections.
When letter carriers report to work each morning, they look at the volume of mail for the day and estimate how long it will take to complete their assigned route. maybe it’s a snowy day, or the day after a holiday when mail volume doubles. if they know it will take more than eight hours, they can volunteer for overtime (sign-ups for overtime are every three months) or the supervisor can allocate a portion of the route to other carriers for the day.
“It’s actually a lot more complicated than that, but it’s a simplified way of explaining how it works,” Renfroe says, noting that individual post offices in large cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Boston can have between 200 and 300 postmen. manage.