So by “San Juan” do you mean that you live in Puerto Rico?
I delivered mail as a summer substitute during college in the early 1970s. The entire area was on a single delivery system, except for the two offices that covered downtown. They made twice a day deliveries.
These were particularly prized routes, because far less walking was involved and you spent a lot of time indoors, either going door-to-door in an office building or putting the mail into boxes on the first floor. The down side that they had to deliver many times more packages than a regular carrier.
Businesses complained about everything so we subs were never allowed anywhere near them. There’s a million opportunities to make mistakes with mail and coming in cold on a brand new route we would make every one. We also got no training and most of the other carriers were too busy to answer questions or just didn’t care.
Multiple day deliveries made sense when the vast bulk of mailing took place inside a city. Air mail cost more and there were fewer national chain stores that did all their mailing out of central locations. All the better high rises had mail chutes that trucks went out to pick up. Those were taken straight to the central Post Office, which was also in downtown, and anything with a downtown zip code got immediately culled and sent back to the offices. Worked great until the world changed too much for it to work at all.
Our office got twice daily USPS delivery until three years ago.
According to my 1960 vintage encyclopedia the regulation is/was that the mailbag can’t weigh more than 30 pounds, and the day’s mail for an individual carrier’s route usually weighed a lot more than that. The article goes on to say that the system of relay boxes is the solution for this problem, but it doesn’t explain how the local PO would “populate” the relay boxes with the day’s mail for the route. Obviously they must have sent a truck around before the letter carrier started, but you’d think they would have hit on the idea of just letting the mail carrier drive his own truck, as is usually done today.
So evidently you might have had two or more mail deliveries in a day, without it necessarily meaning you were ultimately getting your mail more quickly–unless they used to send the trucks out to the relay boxes more than once a day.
(Relay boxes: Those large green mailboxeswith no drop-slot, which you still occasionally see on city streets. I don’t know if they still use them.)
I assume he means the the coasral islands near Bellingham WA.
Back in the 50s we had mail delivery every day, and twice on week days. This was only around Christmas, when people send cards to everyone they knew.
Multiple delivery to city offices was already dead or dying when FAX arrived. Once FAX arrived, city offices stopped regretting the loss of multiple delivery.
Before that Mail was competing with the telephone, and it retained a big advantage in legal offices.
But I wonder if the the major reason for the loss of 4-times-per-day city office delivery was the introduction of centralized sorting. If your individual mailman spends more time sorting than walking, he might as well walk the mail he already has sorted.
Sorry -should have been more specific. We’re in San Juan County, WA which is a group of small islands in northern Puget Sound. Going to the Mainland (which entails a 1 hour ferry ride) is jokingly referred to as ‘Going to America’.
Up til the early 60’s in small town IL too.
I remember 2 deliveries a day in the '50s and early '60s, by the time I had a summer sub route in 1970 they were down to one. I did lots of routes for my post office, which was in Queens. Perhaps they put in more relay boxes when they went to once a day. When I had a bag, as preferred to a cart, I don’t remember it ever being too heavy. Clearly one or two trucks that carried mailbags is a lot cheaper than one truck per carrier.
I wonder if there were more carriers, and thus shorter routes, back in the '50s.
Could be: first round to pick up and carry away outgoing mail; second to deliver incoming mail.
No, they still use relay boxes today in some places. That way a carrier, even one with a truck, can cover his/her area and not have to drive all the way back to a facility.
Those mailboxes that are shaped like regular ones but painted brown or green are relay boxes.
So this means that the mail carrier’s vehicle can’t carry the entire day’s mail for the route, even if the vehicle is packed to the gills with mail? (There’s a mixed metaphor for you). As a matter of fact I have noticed that the mail carriers in my neighborhood are now using station wagons–Ford Tauruses, I believe–which are a lot smaller than the traditional boxy vans typically used where there most houses have curbside mailboxes. So perhaps they are once again using relay boxes around here.
I was around for the switchover to the right-hand-drive jeeps and small trucks. It was a huge deal for all sorts of reasons.
The big one you wouldn’t expect was that experienced employees who had had their route for years knew all the short cuts and could usually finish their routes before noon. Then they went off to their part-time jobs in the afternoon before driving back in their own cars at three. This was a lot harder to hide in an official jeep.
The more normal reasons were still pretty huge. It cost a fortune to buy a vehicle for every carrier. They rolled out the transition nationally over years, but that was still more than a million vehicles. Our main post office was big enough to have its own gas station. They contracted out service, but coordinating that was a pain and spare vehicles were always needed. Parking was a nightmare. The main post office was downtown and had little parking to begin with; now it had to have double since the carriers drove their cars to work and there was always overlap. Driving a vehicle with the steering on the right is a wholly different experience so every carrier had to be retrained and retested. They were all standardized so that they could be reassigned anywhere as needed. Without the need to loop out of a green box routes could be refigured for efficiency so every route was redone. This was all part of the changeover from the Post Office to the USPS so everything was changing every minute, nobody knew what was happening, and all the old guard hated every change.
So yeah, sending a truck around to drop off the bundles that the carriers had set up at their sorting station in the morning was easier and cheaper in many ways. The reality was that that solution was a product of a past that no longer existed, in cities that were emptying out and becoming dominated by suburbs. The world had to be organized and less individual.
lance, I’m not sure why relay boxes would still be needed today. A small truck can handle everything except large packages and those don’t go into relay boxes in the first place. Can you explain?
I believe the method was that a carrier’s bag would have any mail for his route placed in it, and when it reached maximum weight he’d leave with it. Thus, there might be additional mail for addresses he’d already visited in his second bag.
You might not see the postman twice on any given day, but you might see him several times if you got a lot of mail.
ALSO, exactly when you’d see him would be highly variable. Say he comes by every hour from 8am to 4pm, but only stops if he has something for you. Your mail might come at 9am, or it might come at noon, or it might come at 3pm.
I lived in a small town where the mail came once a day at a nicely predictable hour.
The best part was that, since local mail was sorted locally, if you sent a letter to the same zip code you were in, it would get there tomorrow. Picked up from your box today, sorted overnight, sent out to their box tomorrow.
ALL mail for other zip codes was sent to the state capitol for sorting, which added at least 2 days to the trip.
Now I check my mail once a week.
In one way, twice a day delivery still exists.
In many places, the regular mailman delivers letters, bills, magazines, and junk mail to your regular box with a bag over their shoulder or from a right-hand jeep.
But the USPS also employs package delivery mailmen that will go to the same houses and deliver big packages if there’s too much mail for the regular mailman. It’s entirely dependent on how much mail is being delivered to a particular route per day, but it does happen.
Good point, and as package delivery grows at an enormous rate with the growth in e-commerce, this may increase.
We have pretty much similar systems, except that all the urban and suburban mail is delivered on foot. My postman is dropped in our street with two or three bags of mail. What he can’t carry goes in a green relay box while he delivers the rest. Bags can not weigh over 20kg. Parcels are delivered from a van in a completely separate service.
I expect that there are quirks anywhere there is a postal system. Our local one is that there is a particular mailbox on the way out of town, and the opposite side from the sorting office, from where a letter, posted before 7:30pm will be delivered in London the next day. This is because the van with London mail from the sorting office calls there and empties the box on his way past.
We have letterboxes everywhere. I looked up the rules which are about to change:
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there should be a post box within 0.5 miles by straight line distance of at least 98% of delivery points nationally; and
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for the remaining 2% of delivery points, Royal Mail must provide sufficient access points or other means of access to the universal service (e.g. collection on delivery from very remote or isolated locations such as farmhouses) to meet the reasonable needs of users.
This is much less than the current requirement and will mean the removal of a lot of boxes.
Yes, the rules are about to change alot because you privatized the Royal Mail.
It didn’t. My dad was a letter carrier, and when I was young he would sometimes let us walk with him on his route. On the strictly walking routes there were dropboxes at various places along the way. His bag held the mail for one section, and would be empty when he reached the dropbox, where he would open it, swap the empty bag for a full one, and continue. There were also routes with fewer drops, but the carrier pushed a cart instead of carrying a bag.