When we bough this house 18 years ago, the neighborhood was two years old. They had mail box clusters on the curb. After about five years when we were ‘visiting’ the house, noticed everyone had mailboxes and the clusters were gone.
I haven’t seen housing built in the past 25-30 years around here that didn’t have the cluster boxes installed.
Older areas tend to have the mailbox on the porch scheme, and some areas have the mailbox on the curb; I never have been able to divine what made an area go with one or the other.
My neighborhood was built in the 60s, and the mailboxes are all by the street. I thought that was the norm for the average suburban American area?
Now I want there be pizza roombas…
(double sigh)
This is news to me. I thought that everyone in the US had mail delivered to mailboxes by the curbside anyway, with those little flags that stick up when the mailman’s been.
Are you telling me Snoopy has been lying to me all these years?
The flag sticks up to let the mailman know you have something for pickup.
Yeah, all new 'burbs in Canada have had cluster mailboxes since way back in the eighties.
I don’t think they’ve taken away existing door-to-door delivery though. I have to admit that, when I actually saw a letter carrier making her rounds in an older neighbourhood in Oshawa, it took me a few moments to figure out who she was and what she was doing. With the explosive growth of the suburbs since the eighties, it’s become that uncommon, relatively speaking.
Small towns have been picking the mail up at the post office for years anyways.
same for USA.
a person can do a change of address or mail forwarding, both have limited duration. if those aren’t in effect then it goes to the address.
Pfft. That’s low tech. Soon there will be pizza drones!
Some do, some have mailboxes on their front porch or door slots.
The house I live in now was built in the 1950s. It has always had a mailbox out by he street. I don’t see what the big deal is.
In my neighborhood, we currently have door to door delivery. If they decide to change that, and if I have to have an individual mailbox rather than go to a cluster box, the mailman will have to still get out of his truck to get to the mailbox. There are so many cars parked on the street these days.
An awful lot of neighborhoods weren’t built to accommodate three or more cars in the driveways. Take a look at an older suburban working class neighborhood- one car garages, one car driveways. My street is pretty well parked in even during the day.
My mailbox is in a cluster box (~20 feet up the street), though my neighbor to the south has an invidulal strteetside box. If I get a pacjage it is put on my porch.
I don’t mind the clusterbox (it is nice having locked mail)
Brian
This isn’t new. New subdivisions in Houston have had cluster boxes designed into them for years.
Frankly, I’m surprised the USPS didn’t get rid of door-to-door a long time ago.
My mailbox is across the street. I just pick it up from the car when I get home from work, before swinging into my driveway. Not horribly inconvenient.
The USPS has this nifty service called “Hold Mail” in which they will stop delivering your mail for a specific amount of time you set. At the end of the hold period, all your mail is delivered as it usually is. You can even schedule the hold online and avoid the post office altogether.
This is news? I’ve been getting my mail out of cluster boxes since the mid-80s.
Way too much trouble for a few days away. 
I can’t see much changing in rural areas. We already get our mail in a box at the—well, we don’t have a curb, but at the edge of the gravel. Cluster boxes would be a problem; there’s no central location out here, just soybean fields and cow pastures. Our mail is delivered by a USPS “rural carrier,” a part-time, unbenefitted, non-career employee who uses her own vehicle. Maintaining cluster boxes would probably cost more annually.
In town they might have to go to the PO to pick up their mail, which in our closest burg would be a 1/4-mile walk or drive for most of them. No doubt some of them would complain, but I think they’d survive.
Seriously? 
Filling out an online form that, if your browser is set to default auto-fill, takes all of less than one minute to complete and submit? How you managed to type out a reply to my suggestion is mind-blowing.