[It should be clear that the changes to the delivery network now
underway are not simply a “broad strategic plan” or “pilot
program.” Implementation has already begun with the acquisition of
huge spaces in three cities, notification of the employee unions and
associations, and a list of the first 200 post offices that will be
converted over the coming weeks and months. The scope of the plan is
far reaching and nationwide. You don’t need to wait for it to be
“scaled up” to see what’s happening.]
[[link removed]]

MODELING THE NEW USPS DELIVERY NETWORK  
[[link removed]]


 

Steve Hutkins
September 15, 2022
Save the Post Office
[[link removed]]


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_ It should be clear that the changes to the delivery network now
underway are not simply a “broad strategic plan” or “pilot
program.” Implementation has already begun with the acquisition of
huge spaces in three cities, notification of the employee unions and
associations, and a list of the first 200 post offices that will be
converted over the coming weeks and months. The scope of the plan is
far reaching and nationwide. You don’t need to wait for it to be
“scaled up” to see what’s happening. _

, USPS

 

This month the Postal Service will begin implementing a massive
initiative to change how the mail is delivered. Instead of working out
of the back of post offices, letter carriers will be relocated to
large, centralized facilities called Sorting & Delivery Centers. These
S&DCs will be housed in currently operating processing centers, large
post offices, and eventually one of the new multi-functional
mega-plants the Postal Service plans to create over the next few
years. Spaces are already being prepared in Atlanta, Indianapolis, and
Charlotte, where the Postal Service has leased a 620,000 square foot
facility
[[link removed]] almost
adjacent to a large Amazon warehouse.

The effects on postal employees will be significant, as discussed
in this previous post
[[link removed]].
Tens of thousands of letter carriers will find themselves working at
an S&DC that’s much farther from where they live, meaning longer
commutes, more driving time, and more transportation expenses. 
Postmasters and managers will see their positions downgraded because
they don’t have carriers to supervise. Thousands of clerks at post
offices will become unnecessary since they won’t need to provide
support for the carriers. They will be among the 50,000 positions that
the Postmaster General says he plans to eliminate.

Eventually, patrons of post offices will be affected, too. Removing
carrier operations eliminates one of the two main functions of a post
office, and the excess space in the back will be used to justify
“optimizing” the retail network. Some post offices will be
relocated to smaller spaces, some will have their hours reduced, many
will simply be closed. Properties that the Postal Service owns, many
of them significant historic buildings, will be reviewed for disposal.
The neighborhoods and towns in which these post offices are located
will suffer a loss of jobs and economic activity. Tens of millions of
households will fall within the scope of the initiative.

The new delivery network, it’s important to note, is not about
closing small, rural post offices — those that typically come under
attack because they supposedly don’t bring in enough revenue to
justify their existence. The S&DC plan targets urban and suburban post
offices.

One of the main criteria — perhaps _the_ main criterion — for
identifying which post offices will have their carriers relocated is
the distance between the S&DC and the post office. If it’s too far,
too much time and expense go into just getting a carrier from the S&DC
to the first stop on the route. The Postal Service says a 30-minute
drive is the maximum “reach.” Since nearly all the potential S&DCs
are in urban and suburban areas, this distance limitation virtually
guarantees that the impacted post offices will also be in urban and
suburban areas. The post offices in rural areas are just too far
afield.

Getting spoked

The Postal Service has provided very few details about the plan.
Management is apparently trying to manage the concerns of employees
and the public by withholding information. What we do know is that
100,000 carrier routes will be relocated from 6,000 or 7,000 post
offices to several hundred S&DCs in current facilities and the 70 new
mega-plants. The plan was described in a presentation
[[link removed]] dated
July 29, 2022, and a list dated August 12, 2022
[[link removed]],
informed employee associations of the first 200 post offices where
“conversions” will take place. The Postal Service has said nothing
more about which post offices could be impacted.

The July 29th presentation describes the new delivery network in terms
of hubs — the sort and delivery centers — and spokes — the post
offices that will lose their carriers. One of the questions many
people would like to see answered is simply this: Which post offices
could become spokes?

With the help of publicly available USPS facility lists, Google maps,
and some data crunching, it’s possible to build a model that helps
answer this question.

Here’s a map showing 6,100 post offices that could become spoke
facilities. If you zoom in, you can see the post offices in clusters
around the potential S&DC hubs (in red).  The list of spoke post
offices is on Google Docs here
[[link removed]],
where it can be searched, sorted, filtered, and downloaded for further
analysis. The list of potential S&DC hubs is here
[[link removed]]. 

Modeling the network

To determine which postal facilities might become S&DCs and which post
offices might become spoke facilities, the model used the following
inputs.

The July 29th presentation
[[link removed]] says
the Postal Service has identified 928 existing facilities with
available space for an S&DC. In an article in Eagle Magazine,
[[link removed]] the Postal
Service says “it will establish a redesigned operational model that
will touch almost 500 network mail processing locations.” Based on
these comments, the model selected about 770 potential S&DCs.

These include nearly all the 450 Sectional Center Facilities, i.e.,
processing plants that serve a geographical area defined by one or
more three-digit ZIP Code prefixes. It also includes three hundred
other facilities: processing plants, large post offices, annexes and
network distribution centers. Aside from a few smaller plants, the
model includes only those with at least 50,000 square feet. (The July
29th presentation did not include any S&DCs with less than 70,000
square feet.)

Not all these 770 sites are feasible for an S&DC in terms of space,
available parking, location, facility type, and other criteria. Some
will become unnecessary once the mega-plants are available. Some, like
the large post offices, may turn out not to be S&DCs that gain
carriers but spoke facilities that lose them. In any case, these 770
sites can serve as proxies for the facilities in the eventual delivery
network and help identify which post offices could become spoke
offices.

The model includes those post offices that share a 3-digit ZIP prefix
with one of the potential S&DCs, and in some cases it includes those
with a 3-digit zip that’s nearby. It includes only those that are
within a 30-minute drive of the potential S&DC — the maximum one-way
reach. In those cases where there was more than one potential S&DC for
a particular post office, the model may have chosen a S&DC that was
outside the 30-minute reach when then there was another within the
reach. The model thus omits several hundred post offices that that
would otherwise have been included.

The model does not include the 12,000 Remotely Managed Post Offices
— the small rural offices that had their hours cut by POStPlan in
2012. The August 12th list did include a few RMPOs, but they were
excluded from the modeling because they are so small they usually have
one route or none at all and won’t play a significant role in
reaching 100,000 routes. The model also does not include any of the
1,750 Finance Stations and Finance Branches, which by definition
don’t have carriers, nor the 2,600 contractor-operated offices, for
the same reason. 

Using these inputs, the model identified 6,100 offices that could
become spoke offices.  While the model includes some that are not on
the Postal Service’s list and excludes others that are, it provides
a framework to analyze the plan as a whole and its potential
impacts. 

Adding up the impacts

The model shows that the new delivery network is clearly focused on
urban and suburban post offices. Using Census data, the model
indicates that the 6,100 post offices would encompass ZIP codes in
which 116 million people live. That’s a third of the country. Over
105 million of these people live in places classified as
“urban.” Sixty percent of the impacted ZIP code areas have
populations that are at least 90 percent urban.

The model doesn’t include census data
[[link removed](0.4%20percent).] on
race, but minorities account for 43 percent of urban areas compared
with 22 percent of rural areas. The model’s list contains links to a
website with detailed demographic data on the ZIP code for each of the
spoke offices.

The distance from the spoke to the potential S&DCs is one of the key
issues with the plan. This previous post
[[link removed]] explained
how the July 29th presentation provided enough data to make
projections for the entire plan. It showed that the plan would
increase the one-way distance between the S&DCs and spoke offices by
an average of 13.6 miles and 20 minutes.

The model shows almost exactly that: 12.7 more miles and 20 more
minutes.  These increases in distance and time will add 750 million
round-trip miles to the 100,000 routes and 20 million more work hours,
which will require another 10,000 routes. The July 29th presentation
acknowledges that the new network will add 5 to 10 percent more
routes. The model suggests it will be more like 10 percent.

Plus, the drive times will often be much more than 20 minutes since
the model uses data derived by a bulk import from Google maps. They
are best-case scenarios and don’t account for traffic, weather,
alternate routes, and so on. If you compare the model’s data with a
search on Google maps for a particular route at rush hour, you’ll
find that the drive time is typically several minutes longer. On
average, every extra minute added to the average drive time for the
100,000 routes means another 500 routes.

As discussed in the previous post
[[link removed]],
the total cost for labor and transportation (fuel, maintenance, etc.)
will be about $2 billion.  And that’s not even including all the
additional time and expense for the carriers going to and from their
new workplace at the S&DC. On average, just commuting will mean 120
unpaid hours of work and 5,000 more miles annually.

The plan will also create a massive amount of excess space in post
offices. A 2012 OIG report
[[link removed]] on
relocating carriers indicated that delivery units provide about 366
square feet per carrier. The July 29th presentation showed that the
new plant in Indianapolis will provide 250,000 square feet for 566
routes, about 440 feet per route.  Even using the more conservative
OIG estimate, relocating 100,000 routes will involve shifting 37
million square feet of carrier operations from post offices to S&DCs.

About 70 percent of the space needed for 100,000 routes would be
located in current facilities, while the rest would be in the new
mega-plants, like the one in Northpoint Gateway
[[link removed]] industrial
park in Gastonia, NC, in the metro Charlotte area, where the Postal
Service recently signed the lease
[[link removed]] on
a facility with 620,000 square feet — a stone’s throw from a
somewhat smaller Amazon facility.

NORTHPOINT GATEWAY 85 (THE BIG ONE IS USPS, THE SMALLER, AMAZON’S)

INTERIOR OF NORTHPOINT GATEWAY 85

The 37 million square feet of excess space that the new network will
create in post offices will obviously become a significant issue. The
model shows that the 6,100 post offices have about 57 million square
feet, so more than half of the total would turn into excess space. 
In other words, on average, half the floor space of every post office
would become excess space. It’s impossible to imagine that the
Postal Service will not take steps to address this issue by downsizing
the infrastructure.

Optimizing post offices

Google maps has a limit of 2,000 locations per layer, so mapping over
6,000 meant dividing up the list into groups. The map uses the size
and type of post office to make four groups: main post offices with
less than 3,000 square feet; those with 3,000 to 10,000; and those
with more than 10,000. A separate group includes the stations and
branches — the city offices that are under the supervision of the
city’s main post office and postmaster. The map’s layers can be
toggled on and off to see them separately.

The smallest 2,000 post offices, which usually have one to four
carrier routes, average about 2,200 square feet for a total of 4.3
million square feet. If half this were to become excess space, it
would represent just over two million of the 37 million square feet of
excess area the plan will create. 

To envision what might happen to the small offices after the carriers
leave, it’s useful to look back to 2011-2015, when the Postal
Service removed carriers from about 2,700 post offices as part of a
Delivery Unit Optimization initiative. These were mostly small
offices; on average,  2,300 square feet. More than 90 percent of
these DUOed office are still in the same location where they were ten
years ago. Apparently, it wasn’t worth the trouble and small cost
savings to relocate them to an even smaller space. Over half of these
offices, however, had their hours cut and lost their postmasters under
POStPlan. Perhaps that’s what will happen to the smaller spoke
offices.

Two thousand mid-sized offices average about 6,500 square feet and
have about ten carriers. The largest offices, those with 10,000 to
40,000 square feet, average 20,000 square feet. They can have as many
as 30 or 40 carriers. 

For these mid-size and large post offices, the excess space will
become a serious matter. Just cutting hours will not be enough. Postal
logic will dictate that something more needs to be done. Relocations
to smaller spaces and closures will be inevitable.

The stations and branches are the most vulnerable to closure.
The Delivering for America
[[link removed]] plan
says one of its goals is to “evaluate and consolidate low-traffic
stations and branches of city Post Offices into nearby full-service
retail Post Offices.” This element of the DFA plan will hit big
cities the hardest because that’s where stations and branches are
concentrated: Philadelphia has 55; Houston, 43; Los Angeles, 40;
Brooklyn, 36; Chicago, 34; Manhattan, 31, and so on.

In early 2009, the Postal Service announced it would be reviewing
3,200 of its 4,800 stations and branches for closure under what it
called the Stations and Branches Optimization and Consolidation
Initiative.  (“Optimize,” “consolidate” and “rationalize”
are the Postal Service’s preferred terminology for “closed.”) 
The SBOC hit list kept getting smaller while the PRC went through the
process of an Advisory Opinion
[[link removed]].  At
one point the list of probable closures contained 750 post offices,
but by the end, the list was down to about 140, and not all of them
ever closed.

The Postmaster General will not be satisfied with that outcome for
Delivering for America. His 10-year plan calls for $3 to $4 billion in
cost savings by “aligning hours of operation to customer demands at
low traffic Post Offices” and “rationalizing stations and
branches.” Cutting hours might save a few million dollars a year,
but the only way to save $400 million a year is by closing post
offices. Lots of them.

The “not even modern” postal infrastructure

The Postal Service doesn’t seem to think much of post offices or its
properties. At the AEI forum
[[link removed]] in
July, the Postmaster General said the retail network is “so vast
that in all the average American only visits a post office two times a
year.” His math apparently included every man, woman, and child in
the country, and only counted retail transactions, not trips to pick
up mail at a PO box or a package that couldn’t be delivered. In
contrast, the OIG estimated 2.7 billion
[[link removed]] visits
annually, which comes to over 22 per visits per year per household.

In the current article in Eagle Magazine
[[link removed]], the Postal
Service also denigrated postal buildings, describing its facilities as
“sub-par and often unpleasant working environments” and “not
considered state of the art — or even modern — in the logistics
world. Most were built many decades ago. It is equally undeniable that
this has an effect on performance and on the morale and perceptions of
the postal workforce.”

Unfortunately, not all employees will have the opportunity to
experience the pleasures of working in one of those new, light-filled,
low-stress, modern, state-of-the-art mega-plants. Many will continue
working in a “sub-par” P&DC or a large, old post office that’s
become a S&DC.

And as for all the “not even modern” postal properties that
don’t have a place in the new network? They can and will be sold.
Over 2,500 post offices on the model’s list are owned by the Postal
Service. It will be impossible to resist bringing in billions of
dollars with a fire sale, just as the Postal Service seemed committed
to doing ten years ago, when hundreds of historic properties were put
on the disposal list. Fortunately, pushback from the Advisory Council
on Historic Preservation, the National Trust for Historic
Preservation, and several citizens’ groups helped stop the sell-off,
but not before dozens were sold and turned into restaurants, offices,
and the like, if they were fortunate enough not to be razed.

The Postal Service’s list of 200 offices where the first conversions
will occur already contains fifteen historic properties. The model’s
list of 6,000 spoke offices contains more than 400. Among them is the
post office in Norristown PA which the Postal Service originally put
on the market in 2013. Once its 39 carrier routes are gone, it will be
back on the closure-and-disposal list again. The same goes for the
historic post office in Beacon, NY, one of the five Hudson Valley post
offices FDR took a special interest in while he built over a thousand
of them
[[link removed]].
They’re all in danger again.

BEACON NY POST OFFICE (1937)

NORRISTOWN PA POST OFFICE (1934)

Delivering divestiture

Selling postal property has always been high on the agenda of
free-market advocates. It was a major theme of President
Reagan’s 1988 Commission on Privatization
[[link removed]], which said that
“divestiture of federal assets should be pursued” in the interest
of ensuring the “highest and best use” of the Postal Service’s
assets. The Delivering for America plan will make the sell-off a
reality on a massive scale.

Let’s not forget that the same administration that selected our
current Postmaster General also produced a Reform Plan
[[link removed]] calling
for the privatization of the Postal Service. The Reform Plan was clear
about it: “This proposal would restructure the United States Postal
System to return it to a sustainable business model or prepare it for
future conversion from a Government agency into a privately-held
corporation. Like many European nations, the United States could
privatize its postal operator while maintaining strong regulatory
oversight to ensure fair competition and reasonable prices for
customers.”

Unnecessarily adding hundreds of millions of miles to carrier routes
at a cost of $2 billion a year should be cause enough to reject the
S&DC plan, but there’s a deeper reason to condemn it. The new
delivery network should be seen for what it is: A plan to dismantle
the post office infrastructure. Retail postal operations in shopping
centers and big box stores are no replacement for the
multi-functional, stand-alone, brick-and-mortar post offices that make
up this infrastructure. Without them, the postal system becomes just
another logistics company. If that happens, full-scale privatization
will be just around the corner.

The regulator will monitor

Despite the massive scope of the initiative to transform the delivery
network, the Postal Service has not requested an Advisory Opinion from
the Postal Regulatory Commission. The Postal Service says the changes
will not affect service from the customer’s point of view because
the retail operation will remain in place after the carriers leave. 

When asked by Ina Steiner at ecommercebytes
[[link removed]] why
the PRC had not initiated a review, the Commission provided a
statement explaining that “federal courts and the Commission have
previously found that broad strategic plans alone do not trigger this
legal requirement [for an Advisory Opinion], although Commission
leadership monitors such plans.”

Last year the Attorneys General of twenty states submitted
a Complaint
[[link removed]] to
the Commission arguing that the entire Delivering for America plan
should be reviewed under the Advisory Opinion statute as soon as
possible. The Postal Service’s approach of waiting until
implementation is imminent, they argued, means that “the Commission
will have to wait a decade” to issue an advisory opinion, at which
point “it will be too late” for appropriate Commission review and
public participation. 

The Commissioners rejected the Complaint
[[link removed]] for various
reasons, among them their view that “articulating broad and
high-level future initiatives in a strategic plan cannot be considered
instituting or implementing a change with a meaningful impact on
service within the meaning of 39 U.S.C. § 3661(b).” In last
week’s response to ecommercebytes
[[link removed]],
the Commission also stated that “local pilot programs are an
important step towards implementation but may not meet the nationwide
or substantially nationwide standard until they are scaled up more
broadly.”

It should be clear that the changes to the delivery network now
underway are not simply a “broad strategic plan” or “pilot
program.” Implementation has already begun with the acquisition of
huge spaces in three cities, notification of the employee unions and
associations, and a list of the first 200 post offices that will be
converted over the coming weeks and months.  The scope of the plan is
far reaching and nationwide. You don’t need to wait for it to be
“scaled up” to see what’s happening.

Perhaps the Commission will encourage the Postal Service to request an
Advisory Opinion on the new delivery network. Or perhaps not. Perhaps
there will be no review by the regulator until the Postal Service
decides it’s time to announce cuts to retail hours and post office
closures. But if the carrier relocations have already occurred, it
will be too late to do anything about them. The excess space in post
offices will be irreversible, and it will make more dismantling of the
postal infrastructure inevitable. The horse will have left the barn.
The carriers will have left the building.

 

* USPS
[[link removed]]
* Postmaster DeJoy
[[link removed]]
* post offices
[[link removed]]
* postal workers
[[link removed]]
* American Postal Workers Union
[[link removed]]

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