In this episode, we explore the Postal Service's latest efforts to modernize its vehicle fleet. Director of Fleet Management, Justin Glass, gives listeners an inside look at this important initiative, from the rigorous testing required to ensure these new vehicles can handle the diverse climates of the United States, to the crucial role the Delivering for America plan has played in driving the ambitious goal of deploying 106,000 new vehicles over the next five years. Tune in to hear how this historic fleet upgrade will transform the Postal Service and ensure its operations are prepared for the future.
This week on Mailin' It, we’re joined by the Director of Fleet Management, Justin Glass, who takes us behind the scenes of the epic effort USPS is taking to modernize its vehicle fleet. Discover the strategic planning and innovative design choices that are driving this transformation. Join us to learn about the newly designed Next Generation Delivery Vehicles which promise enhanced safety, better ergonomics, lower emissions, and double the cargo space.
Karla Kirby:
Hello and welcome to Mailing It, the official podcast of the United States Postal Service. I'm Karla Kirby.
Jonathan Castillo:
And I'm Jonathan Castillo. On average every day, the Postal Service process processes 421.4 million pieces of mail. Getting all that mail to 167 million addresses across the nation requires a lot of driving. So it's no surprise the Postal Service manages one of the world's largest vehicle fleets, but it's also an aging fleet. Many of those iconic white trucks we're used to seeing in our neighborhoods date back to the late 1980s.
Karla Kirby:
In today's episode, we're going to talk about a major project underway to modernize the Postal Services delivery fleet. It's the biggest deployment of new vehicles in Postal's history. And here to take us through it is Justin Glass, our Director of Fleet Management. Justin, welcome to mailing it.
Jonathan Castillo:
Thank
Justin Glass:
You for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Jonathan Castillo:
Justin. I can only imagine what it must be like to manage and maintain more than 256,000 vehicles, especially with many of them having been on the road for more than a couple decades. Can you give us some highlights of the plan to modernize our fleet?
Justin Glass:
Yes, I can. And again, this is a great endeavor that we are embarking upon. We're gonna really stick on our modernization effort here to our delivery fleet. That is where we're focusing our modernization efforts and what we have planned over the next five years. We are going to procure and deploy over 106,000 new delivery vehicles. Within that 66,000 of those will be battery electric. All of them though, you know, including the 40,000 that'll be internal combustion engine, they're all gonna include the latest safety features, things like backup cameras, driver assist features, looking at, you know, lane departure or incoming traffic alerts and things like that. Blind spot monitoring, collision sensors, automatic rear and front braking, all in an effort to keep our employees safe while modernizing the environment that they are in. In that, we've got four main types of vehicles that we are making up of this 106,000 right now.
That's the Mercedes Metris and the Ram ProMaster. Both of those have been on the road for a little while. The Mercedes Metris is a right hand drive vehicle, which enables our carriers to make delivery outta the right hand side. The Ram ProMaster is a larger vehicle, more built for park and loop routes or dismount routes, things where they can get out and make deliveries within a neighborhood and get back in. As well as helping us give more cargo capacity for our package volume. We'll also have Ford eTransit electric vehicles. These are very similar, similar to the Ram ProMaster that we've seen around there, but of course these are electric. And then we are gonna, of course have our, our next generation delivery vehicles that'll make up a large portion of this 106,000. Those are actually gonna be in service for over 20 years. Those are, are our purpose built vehicles that designed for long life while the others are more commercial off the shelf. And we'll have a shorter shelf life for us.
Karla Kirby:
I know that many Postal delivery vehicles have very specific requirements and the driver being on the right side for one, but what's the reason for choosing four different types of vehicles?
Justin Glass:
That is a very good question, and it could probably take us about five hours to answer that, but we'll keep it pretty brief here, right. It really comes down to the needs of the Postal Service and its delivery operations. The vast majority of our Postal routes require delivery from the right hand side of the vehicle. The mailboxes are on the right hand side of the road, facing the road, so the carriers can make efficient delivery, ergonomic delivery, and make sure that, you know, we're keeping very productive and not wasting a lot of time having to carry, have to get up and get out and go walk to a mailbox and come sit back down. That's a lot of unnecessary movement that we could eliminate by having a right hand drive vehicle. So needing, it's those requirements of the delivery network, of our operations that really drive what we need to get inside of that.
You know, you start considering what you have out there in, in the United States market, there's not a lot of right hand drive vehicles. In fact, if you asked anybody out there, tell me a company that makes right hand drive vehicles, the answer's pretty much gonna be nobody. We can't find any. There's very limited options out there. And so within that, you try to look to, we have an urgent need. We have a fleet that is aging. We talked about, you know, one of the world's largest civilian fleets out there, that that fleet is aging, and we need, we have urgency to replace the vehicles combined with a specific requirement set that's driving our needs. So that gives us, you know, very limited era targeted vehicle types that we can go after. But we want to hit that urgency. You know, we can't wait 20, 30 years to get all these vehicles in. We need to make movements now so we find where we can hit what's available in the market and apply that to our Postal operations.
Jonathan Castillo:
What's the difference between you know, I think you mentioned these purpose-built vehicles as opposed to, you know, off the shelf.
Justin Glass:
So, purpose-built vehicles are vehicles that are designed for a specific use case. You know, for us, for example, the Postal Service, again, we need right hand drive delivery. We need something that's going to be around for a long time. It's gonna be durable. It's built to last. It's built to handle multiple terrains. It's built to operate in various temperatures because in the United States Postal Service, as you all are aware, we don't get to say where we're gonna deliver and where we're not gonna deliver. We are going to deliver to those 167 million addresses, six and seven days a week. And so we gotta have a vehicle that can do that. And with that amount of investment, and you're spinning up a new manufacturer, you need somebody that's gonna be, you know, have a vehicle that's gonna be around for a while. And so the commercial market, you go out to buy something from a dealer's lot out there today.
That stuff's not designed to last 20 plus years. Every single day in the heavy amount of use, 300, 400, 500 stops a day like ours are. You need something that can handle the rigor. And so that's where the purpose-built comes from, you know, and why we pursued a purpose-built program, the commercial off the shelf world cots, commercial off the shelf is what you could go get right now from let's say Ford or GM, Ram Chrysler, Mercedes. We're using many of those. There, there is a use case for the commercial off the shelf specifically really to help us get to as a bridge to where we need to be. We know we can have many routes that can take left hand drive. Maybe they last eight to 10 years, not the 20, but they can give us a gap till we can get that right hand drive vehicle in the right spot. They can give us that, that bridging the of the gap to get to where we need to be and satisfy that urgent need that we have right now 'cause those vehicles are aging.
Karla Kirby:
Justin, you mentioned that ordering the purpose built vehicles takes a lot of time. So what went into getting these built and designing the specs?
Justin Glass:
Yeah, and it, it is definitely a journey and it has been a journey through many years for the Postal Service to get to this point. You know, you, you start with defining what those requirements are and the Postal Services Vehicle Center of Excellence led that effort and worked with our carriers worked with headquarters delivery operations, worked with safety ergonomics, worked with the unions. We, we worked with a lot of different stakeholders to determine what are those unique requirements? What are the things that we need that vehicle to build? So the first bit of building this purpose-built program is understanding what those requirements are so that a supplier or multiple suppliers could then build to that. And so that's what that next step, once you settle on those requirements, you put out that statement of work for design prototype vehicles, and multiple people then came in and said, Hey, I'm a supplier. I think I have a way to meet your requirements. So we had several different suppliers provide prototypes, and then the Postal Service’s team took that and evaluated each one of those prototypes. And that evaluation process goes through, you know, different rigors to make sure we're identifying the right supplier that can meet our demands, meet the requirements as we stated there, and the ones that the team ultimately prefers. And so you go through that and you go through the various stages then of procurement in terms of then getting, you know, the formal designs out there. You kind of knock out the folks that could not meet on the original prototypes, and then you evaluate the ones that did make it through for overall quality and performance and, and value for the Postal Service. You know, when value's gonna include cost. And so as you go through all that, then you make sure that you get your right decision. And that took multiple years for us to go through to make sure we found the right supplier. But then once you identify that supplier purpose-built programs, it would be ideal if somebody had a vacant warehouse already to go, and then you could put 'em right on there. But nobody builds that far in advance to say, I know I'm gonna get this. You can't invest millions of dollars, so maybe hundreds of millions of dollars to get facilities ready until you know. So once that supplier was chosen, then they had to spin up their factory. They found their location, they put in all of their automated equipment, they're getting all that going. And that award was made in February of 2021. And they started producing vehicles with our first deliveries in June of 2024. So you could see how long that took, and that was them getting facilities ready for an automated line so that they can be popping out 20,000 vehicles a year.
Jonathan Castillo:
While we're on the subject of NGDV’s, let's talk about their unique look. You know, since we obviously can't show our audience what these vehicles look like, can you tell us a little bit about the design decisions that were made for that vehicle?
Justin Glass:
Yeah, I mean, if you've seen the images out there and hopefully you have because they've been well publicized and they get a little bit of ridicule, right? But the really cool thing about this is the NGDV was designed with a specific purpose in mind, and that's Postal delivery. And it may look a little interesting, and some people find it comical. Some people say it looks like a duck or a platypus, or something like that. It has that because it was designed specifically with the Postal Services operations in mind to be able to accommodate our workforce. So it's designed for the 95th percentile male as well as the fifth percentile female, to be able to have much wider visibility than what we have today to be able to see all points of the road, just a couple feet in front of them. That's why we have a huge windshield designed the way it is to accommodate that span of heights, because our employees span all various sizes and it accommodates that. Then also, you know, a 95th percentile male can stand up without their head hitting the roof, and you still need that fifth percentile female to be able to sit in that seat comfortably and ergonomically and have the visibility through the windshield to see just three feet in front of them. So it was designed with safety in mind, and then when you pull all that together, it gives it a little unique design. And honestly, though, as unique as it is, and sometimes as what you get, some of the humorous statements out there, this design truly grows on you. And you know what, as you, if you've seen it as much as I have, it starts to be like, look, that's actually a normal looking car. And when you consider form, they really function over form. And in a lot of cases, when we go out and buy a car, sometimes we're buying form over function. In this instance, it is function over form and it's gonna do its job tremendously.
Jonathan Castillo:
That's really good to hear. One of the things I wanted to ask is one of the, the knocks on the LLV, if you will there's not a lot of space in the back for, for packages, right? So are the NGDV’s bigger than the LLVs?
Justin Glass:
The NGDV’s are significantly bigger. We have more than doubled the cargo capacity in the back. And again, if you've ever been in an LLV and tried to grab mail out of that LLV and you have any kind of height, you know how much you have to lean over. And it's not a comfortable working environment. Again, this is designed for the 95th percentile male to be able to walk through that vehicle without having to duck. Their heads are not gonna hit the top of the, the NGDV. Now, our very tallest people may have to duck a little bit, but nowhere near which we had to duck with an LLV. You know, if you just look at the height difference overall, the NGDV is 111 inches tall. The LLV is 85 inches tall.
Jonathan Castillo:
Wow. I'm sure carriers are gonna love that.. I understand that the Postal Service asked several mail carriers for, you know, their input on these NGDV’s on the final design of them. I'm curious, what are the sorts of things that, you know, these mail carriers were asking for?
Justin Glass:
So, yeah, as we, we went through this whole process with the prototypes. I mentioned having the carriers and the unions involved in that as part of the stakeholders. But also once we got centered down to, or selected down to, to Oshkosh in this NGDV, we had their design and we wanted to bring the carriers in to do what we call final design review. Looking at what we have, how do we put this into the exact settings, the exact you know, setup that will help them be more productive and more comfortable. They're the ones that are gonna be living this every day for the next 20 plus years, right? And so we brought in over 30 carriers. They then evaluated what Oshkosh's prototype was and kinda said, Hey, here's some changes we'd like to make. And those are things like, Hey, there's a gap over here. I might drop letters and we don't need to have a spot where this letters could be lost. If I drop it in this gap, let's put a box, let's seal this off, things like that. Or, I need a coat hook moved because where you have it currently set that that could end up impeding my ability to be productive. Can we move coat hooks around on this side? Can we move the door from sliding open from left to right to right to left? Could we make the mail tray more in a more reachable location? And, you know, hey, the, the, the steps as we go through and getting in and out, I need the steps to be a little bit more you know, maybe some of them may be too severe, some of them may be could give me a little bit more gap. And so we kind of worked through to make sure we honed in the specific designs to get to that final product that the carriers are gonna love and enjoy for the next 20 plus years.
Jonathan Castillo:
Justin, you mentioned that you know, these new NGDV’s, we plan on having them for about 20 years in service, right? And as we're leading up to the production of them, there was a lot of testing that was going through. What types of, you know, tests, what types of rigors did we go through to kind of test these out to make sure that they're gonna be able to last, you know, 20 years into the future?
Justin Glass:
Thank you for that question. And yeah, it's, it's very important to us that we know we're getting, we're purchasing a quality product. And you know, the last thing we wanna do is get something out there that's not gonna work and not gonna give us that what, you know, we paid for a 20 year performance and not give us that. So we worked with the supplier to go through various levels of testing across multiple components. Let's take, you know, we'll start with, you know, can the doors open and close for 20 plus years? Can the windows roll up and down for 20 plus years? So we did cycle testing on all of this stuff and where the, the supplier did, and they provide us evidence of that. And our, our vehicle center of excellence, who, who is in charge of the quality of this build. We're sending engineers out to, to monitor the testing of all this stuff. And so you test the doors opening and closing, you know, hundreds of thousands of cycles, hundreds of thousands of cycles of windows rolling up and down thousands of cycles of keys being pressed and different things like that to make sure that the, the initial quality there is gonna hold up to the rigors of the Postal Services daily demand. And let's be honest, we wear vehicles out because you're talking 400, 500 stops a day in and out door opening and closing all day long. Again, that's why you need that purpose built rigor behind it. And we did test for that. But in terms of vehicle performance overall, we did both cold weather and hot weather testing. You, we tested this at high altitudes. So cold weather, it's taken us up to the, to Northern Minnesota and running this, you know, through slush, through ice, through all the stuff that you can, you know, check in, can it stop when it gets all, you know, the ice built up on the tires and all this stuff and everything around all the slush.
So you did a lot of the slush testing and, and everything like that. Multiple years. Again, we've talked about since we signed in 2021 to getting vehicles out in 2024, we were out there multiple times in Northern Minnesota. We were putting these through, you know, the paces in Death Valley, you know, to get hot temperature, you know, taking it up into the mountains of Colorado to, to get altitude testing and things like that. So testing it in every environment 'cause at the end of the day, the Postal Service, we're gonna operate in every environment. And then there are mandated safety tests that are regulated by National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration, things like that. Federal Motor Vehicle safety standards test. You know, you gotta do crash testing, you gotta do EPA testing. And, and the NGDV has passed all of those easily, you know, it's done very well.
It's actually outperformed what they believe they would do in some of those cases, which is great. You know, you know, emissions testing is, is gone really well for the ICE. Of course with the BEV, there's no, there's no emissions, but, you know, brake testing, all this stuff, you know, that's part of what you, you do in those couple years while you're building a factory too, is you get prototypes. You get what we call design cognizant vehicles or tests, proving vehicles. And you go and you prove that the vehicle can do what it needs to do.
Jonathan Castillo:
It sounds like you are very proud of, you know, this project, and it's gonna be something that really is it makes the Postal Service proud. How do you feel about that?
Justin Glass:
Yeah the NGDV program we're very proud of, right? It is a unique vehicle for the Postal Services needs that is going to provide a very comfortable working environment for our carriers for the next 20 years. Let's, let's face it, I mean, that those vehicles are their offices and they're spending, you know, eight to 10 to 12 hours some days, maybe longer in peak, right? They're spending a lot of time in there and they, we need to provide something that they can be proud of as well. And we believe we have, this is, again, we've involved them in this entire program union involvement from the National Association of Letter Carriers, the National Rural Letter Carries Association, and we've had the APWU there as well, because they maintain these vehicle and using that experience, I think we've provided, you know, or Oshkosh has provided us a product, we're purchasing a product that they're all can be proud of, that they all had a stake in. And that is gonna provide, again, comfort and ergonomics and modern safety equipment that's gonna keep our folks working comfortably and safe for the next 20 plus years. So we're very proud of that. We have a truly great product here to provide to our customers there, which are our carriers.
Karla Kirby:
So it's no coincidence that the fleet modernization is coming just a few years into the Postmaster Generals Delivering for America Plan. What role did the DFA play in getting the fleet upgrade to the point that it's at today?
Justin Glass:
Well, it drove everything, right? We, we base all of our decisions about how it best aligns with the Delivering for America plan as we seek to transform how we serve our customers out there. And Fleet Modernization was a core tenant that was included in the Delivering for America plan. In fact, it's a key part, a section of the chapter around improving delivery operations. And so it is definitely a key part of that. It's one of the largest investments that's being made in delivering for America Plan. And vehicles are a necessary expense, a necessary cost to be able to conduct business, and you wanna minimize that necessary cost to the extent that you can. And we, we have some savings opportunities by replacing vehicles that are 30 plus years old with newer vehicles. And that way we can still, we can focus the rest of our expenses that we, you know, save onto the core business of Delivering for America.
Jonathan Castillo:
You mentioned that the modernization effort will actually take costs outta the system, right? How does that work?
Justin Glass:
So, you know, the, the big thing, and we've talked about it at the beginning and, and just kind of reiterate, you know, the majority of our fleet is based on right now the long life vehicle. The long life vehicle, LLV as it's commonly called, was built on a 1987 Chevy S 10 chassis. That vehicle 1987, and this is 2024, that's 37 years old, right? As vehicles age, if you own a vehicle, you certainly are aware of this as vehicles age, they start to cost more and more money as you go forward. Postal Service is not exempt from that. These vehicles are approaching 40 years old, you know, they're gonna cost more. Things are gonna break down a little bit more often. Now, as you get to a 30 plus year old vehicle, where you start running into issues is parts availability.
Who makes parts for a 1987 Chevy S 10 anymore? Where do you find them? But we do have some suppliers that can give us things. But as we become more and more the only buyer of those parts, they're gonna start to increase in cost. So these costs continue to increase every year. It's not just theory. It's happening every single year. We watch it in the numbers and we, we see where we have that. So if we can inflect that and bring the cost to maintain those vehicles down, that can justify the purchase of a capital at the, at the very beginning. So, what'll help us save expenses in the long run while maintaining this necessary thing that we have, again, vehicles, it's a necessary investment. It's one that you need to sustain operations. It's not like we're, we're buying 'em to generate a whole lot of savings out there, but we've gotta be able to maintain our operations, sustain those operations in a, in a cost effective way. And that's what Fleet Modernization will help us do. It'll take a lot of expenses outta the organization.
Karla Kirby:
It seems the new vehicles will also support the Postal Services overall transformation because they're designed with today's mail composition in mind. For example, package volume has increased over the past few decades, which means our delivery vehicles need to reflect that. You mentioned that the new next gen vehicle is going to include more parcel space, correct?
Justin Glass:
That's correct. You know, you're, you're absolutely spot on. That delivery market has changed dramatically from the eighties and nineties to today, right? The world has changed dramatically from the eighties and nineties to today. And certainly that mail mix was not, you know, excluded from that change. And that's what's driving a lot of our change overall in the organization. Vehicles are not exempt from that. And that is one of the great things about our vehicle modernization efforts is each of these vehicles bringing in have more cargo capacity than the LLV. Most of them have significantly more. And that's gonna provide us that ability to better serve a growing package demand, while also being able to meet our core mail delivery requirements on a daily basis.
Jonathan Castillo:
I think it's interesting, you know, for the first time in our history, really the Postal Services fleet will include a significant number of electric vehicles, what you mentioned, 66,000 EVs, right? So that's about, that's about 62% of the entire fleet, you know, so what was behind that decision to make more than half of the new fleet battery electric?
Justin Glass:
Well, it comes down to meeting opportunity within our requirements, right? And we talked about that earlier, how the, the purpose-built platform and everything like that, it's all about meeting what the Postal Services operational requirements are. And in this instance, there was an opportunity that the Postal Service had to meet its operational requirements with something that could also be more sustaining for the environment. And it, you know, not everywhere do we have that opportunity. You know, we can't go a hundred percent electric today, it would not work feasibly for our operations, but the Postal Service took a look at this and said, you know, where we have the opportunity to apply the sustainable solution to our operational requirements, we will. And so it's really the merging of our requirements with what opportunity we have out there. The other part that helped play into that and helped provide some of that opportunity was the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided $3 billion worth of funding from Congress and the administration to the Postal Service to help it pursue battery electric vehicles and to, for the infrastructure and for the vehicle purchases itself.
Karla Kirby:
So I can only imagine that deploying a fleet of EVs has its challenges. So for example, how are you planning to charge all of these vehicles?
Justin Glass:
Yeah, it certainly is our challenge at the moment. And it's something that the, the organization has been very purposeful about how we solve this challenge. And one of the things the Postal Service has been very adamant on is we need to pursue at least early on here, but you know, you know, potentially for long term a, a policy or a strategy that has one charger per vehicle. And the reason why, again, is at the end of the day, we're responsible for delivering to 167 million addresses, six and seven days a week. And you, you have to have that, that fuel. And then our fuel in this case is electricity. And so we need each vehicle to be ready to go at the, at the start of the day and not have to worry about balancing charger usage throughout a day because our delivery is not optional, right? It's one that we've gotta, we've gotta hit a 167 million addresses, six and sometimes seven days a week. And that is our challenge, is how do we then apply a charger for every vehicle? We can't just do one charger for an office of a hundred routes and say everybody share that, right? You've gotta have a significant number of chargers for these routes. And so we looked across the organization and you try to identify, how do I install 66,000 chargers out there to hit 66,000 vehicles? When you try to identify what, what facilities actually have that infrastructure that can handle it, the ones that are the most likely candidates to have electric power infrastructure to support a large number of chargers are our new sorting and delivery centers. And this is a great hybrid meshing of Delivering for America various facets, you know, from how we wanna redesign the network to also then how we modernize the vehicles.
And they really merge together and they work really compliment each other very well here. Those facilities are the most likely to have a ample power available to put several chargers out there. And so we're starting at our sorting delivery centers. And then our next phase from that will be our, our, our modernized plants, the LPCs that will have SDCs within them, because those will also most likely candidates to have enough power. And then we'll look at our larger delivery units and kind of go from there. Again, large delivery units that may have an EDUS or an ADUS out there may have that the most likely candidates next to have the power. And so we'll work down as those candidates sites that have more than likely enough power to be able to handle a large number of chargers.
Karla Kirby:
So for a long time, our fleet modernization plans were something we talked about in the future tense something, you know, that was coming down the pipe. Now it sounds like the future is absolutely here as part of the DFA, we have rolled out our vehicle modernization. So what, in closing, would you like to share with our listeners about fleet modernization as a whole, or things that they should look for in their neighborhood?
Justin Glass:
Ooh, there you go. This is the exciting part, and this is what makes us so happy to be doing this and, and, you know, really charges us up. You know, getting these new vehicles out there is such a big deal. You know, 106,000 vehicles, they're not all coming at once. Again, we talked about it's gonna take, you know, through 2028 to get these 106,000 vehicles, but it's happening right now. To your point, Karla, it is happening right now. We talked about earlier, 20,000 vehicles have been deployed this year. You're seeing them in neighborhoods across the nation, right? We're not just going and hitting one sector at a time, one part of the country starting to northeast go all the way down. We're hitting into these various different environments right now. The NGDVs, they, they started rolling into the Postal Service in June.
You know, we've got, we've got a handful of those vehicles now and again, we've purchased 50,000. We'll see those coming in over the next several years. And as these things come out, you're gonna see more and more electric vehicles, right? As of today, we have about 165 electric vehicles operating on routes every single day across 13 SDCs. That is really cool. Now, you take me a month ago, and it was significant less. This is ramping up very quickly. It's rolling, and it is not a thing that is far into the future. It is happening right now. And it's funny, I've been, I told my team, you know, when we hit the calendar year of 2024, we knew this is when NGDV’s were coming. We knew this is when we would deploy our first electric vehicles. Said, look, the future is no longer coming, the future is now. And for fleet modernization for the Postal Service modernization is now, and it's happening. And it's really exciting time to be part of all of this, because what better way can we serve our carriers who are serving our customers and giving them something that's safe, comfortable, has air conditioning for the summer, has heat for the winter is gonna give them something that's gonna change their lives positively for the next 20 plus years.
Jonathan Castillo:
Well, I'll tell you this. I for one cannot wait to see my letter carrier coming down the street in one of these new NGDV’s. Justin, thank you so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure speaking with you. And, and wow, like you said, what an exciting time for the Postal Service.
Justin Glass:
Yeah, thank you again, and thank you for letting us share our story and it's a privilege to do this. So thank you very much.
Jonathan Castillo:
Let's end today's episode with another “Did You Know” segment when Karla and I share little known facts about the US Postal Service. I'll kick things off. Karla. Did you know that certain US zip codes can't be reached by land without first going through Canada?
Karla Kirby:
I can only assume these places are in Alaska.
Jonathan Castillo:
Well, you know what they say about assuming. Actually one is in Minnesota and the other is in Washington state. In Minnesota the area is called the Northwest Angle and is home to the northernmost post office in the contiguous US. At the end of the Revolutionary War, the founding fathers consulted an erroneous map for border negotiations with the British, resulting in a small part of the US, including Angle Inlet, Minnesota, ending up in what you think would be Canada.
Karla Kirby:
So does this mean the US Postal Service operates in Canada?
Jonathan Castillo:
Well, not exactly. Mail for Angle Inlet comes through Grand Forks, North Dakota, and then stops in Warroad, Minnesota. A contractor then crosses the border to transport the mail to Angle Inlet and a place called Oak Island. Residents of Angle Inlet pick up their mail at the post office, where roughly 100 people have PO boxes.
Karla Kirby:
That sounds complicated. We definitely have it easy. How about the zip code in Washington?
Jonathan Castillo:
That's Point Roberts, Washington. It sits at the end of the Peninsula where the only land access is through British Columbia, Canada. Entry to Point Roberts requires two international border crossings.
Karla Kirby:
That makes me appreciate my commute just a little bit more. And now for my Did You Know, we're heading even farther north past Canada to the North Pole, Jonathan, did you know that the North Pole had its own postmark?
Jonathan Castillo:
Really how much mail is even going through the North Pole?
Karla Kirby:
It's more for commemorative purposes. On August 3rd, 1958, the world's first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus became the first submarine to reach the North Pole. As it passed under the polar ice cap crew members, Frank Holland and John Crotch decided to commemorate the trip with a special postmark and envelope cache stamp. Crew members helped cancel 1,528 envelopes with Holland and Crotches handmade devices. The cache was added on the trip up, and the date stamp was applied while the sub was 700 feet below the surface.
Jonathan Castillo:
Wow. Did the mail ever make it to its final destination?
Karla Kirby:
Why yes. After the Nautilus emerged on August 5th, the ship's commander was flown to a press conference in Washington DC, where he presented the specially canceled mail. Even though the mail was canceled by a ship crew and not by Postal workers, the envelopes were successfully mailed to their destinations. And that wraps up this episode of Did You Know
Jonathan Castillo:
Karla, what a great conversation we had today with Justin. For me, it's the sheer size and scope of this vehicle modernization effort. I mean, we're talking about adding 106,000 new vehicles, more than half of which will be battery electric, by the way, to the largest fleet in the federal government. This is truly a monumental undertaking of historic proportions.
Karla Kirby:
I think, yes, Justin was very enthusiastic about this effort and just to hear that we are replacing vehicles that have been here for upwards of nearly 40 years is definitely a vast undertaking. So kudos to him and his team, the DFA, for bringing this to a reality. As I mentioned, this was such a large effort and something we've been talking about just for years, and to see it happening now is such a great thing. And that's all for this episode of Mailin’ It. Don't forget to subscribe to Mailin’ It wherever you get your podcast. To make sure you don't miss the next episode and follow along on Instagram @USPostalService, X, formerly known as Twitter @usps, and on Facebook.