The Postal Service’s new delivery vehicles aren’t going to win a beauty contest. They’re tall and ungainly. The windshields are vast. Their hoods resemble a duck bill. Their bumpers are enormous.
“You can tell that (the designers) didn’t have appearance in mind,” postal worker Avis Stonum said.
Odd appearance aside, the first handful of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles that rolled onto postal routes in August in Athens are getting rave reviews from letter carriers accustomed to cantankerous older vehicles that lack modern safety features and are prone to breaking down — and even catching fire.
Within a few years of the initial rollout, the fleet will have expanded to 60,000, most of them electric models, serving as the Postal Service’s primary delivery truck from Maine to Hawaii.
Once fully deployed, they’ll represent one of the most visible signs of the agency’s 10-year, $40 billion transformation led by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who’s also renovating aging facilities, overhauling the processing and transportation network, and instituting other changes.
This is awesome. We still need to get rid of LeJoy.
I have no idea how he’s still there.
The president can’t directly fire him, and inexplicably hasn’t used the indirect means available (appointing new members to the board of governors who would do the needful).
Biden used his direct power to cancel student debt for a lot of borrowers and the Supreme Court illegally blocked it so laws are meaningless in this country.
Basically the governors on the board like him, the senate will fight any appointments, and Biden cowed him over the electrical vehicles already, so it was largely a win, somewhat a loss as is.
Initially the new vehicles were going to be like 90% gas, 10% electric. Biden forced him to flip to almost all electric.
I’ll be blunt: the EV win is going to be categorically meaningless if DeJoy ends up fucking with mail in ballots enough that it makes an impact on the result of the election
It’s a small win orthogonal to that.
Thanks, this is super useful context. I was also scratching my head how something broadly positive was coming out of De Joy, who has certainly worked to dismantle USPS from what I remember.
It’s in spite of him, not from him.
Well actually, now he can. “Official act, fuck you.” (per Trump v. United States, No. 23-939)
But only if he assassinates him, right?
I mean, yeah, that’s one way to “fire” someone.
Also: is an assassination if it’s an “official act”?
Why wouldn’t it be?
From what I’ve seen he is doing a lot of good.
Damn people are mad.
Y’all I don’t have some super in-depth view of the postal service.
I just know they’re paying like ~$22+ an hour to be a rural route driver here.
That’s damn good money for here, and maybe federal health and retirement benefits.
I’m not sure if you’re usps or a contractor and how that would all fall out.
Hell they don’t even get the new cars the article is about, they have to use their own.
~$22.00 an hour to sit in your car and deliver mail is an excellent wage even accounting for wear and tear plus no benefits.
Maybe not everywhere, but I make the same plus benefits for filling trailers with boxes in the heat and cold, and I live a pretty decent life, bought a house, and am saving for retirement plus paying off old debts.
Plus it’s pretty around here, especially on the gravel roads.
The main reason you seem to have been down voted soo much is because you said that Dejoy was the cause of the recent improvements in the postal system. While he was over the USPS during the changes, it’s pretty obvious that he’s not the reason for them. $22hr is decent, but it really does depend on where you live, and they do have deliver a lot of packages, so it’s not an amazingly cushy job (I think a UPS driver is paid like ~$30hr in my area, although you could argue they are moving more packages on avg).
He tried to get them to mainly use gas powered hybrid ones. Which sounds great on the surface, but they basically got the same mpg as the now at least 30 year old LLVs they were replacing, just with AC. When that fact was put out, these fully electric ones genuinely just made way more sense for most postal routes. They took a long time to develop, but that’s because the usps had a long list of stuff they wanted to accommodate (sounds crazy, but they seem to have actually taken a lot of feedback from the drivers).
He also got rid of a lot of the automated letter sorting, most likely to slow mail-in voting. A lot of those sorter couldn’t easily be replaced, as they were expensive machines.
No, he’s made forced concessions to the Biden administration, but it’s only to placate them enough to keep his position, and double dip with contracts for XPO (the business he used to own and still has financial ties with).