Deep in an appropriations bill passed by the 52nd Congress on March 3, 1893, was the clause
“For free-delivery service, including existing experimental free-delivery offices, eleven million two hundred and fifty-four thousand nine hundred dollars, of which the sum of ten thousand dollars shall be applied under the direction of the Postmaster-General to experimental free-delivery in rural communities other than towns and villages.” (27 Stat. 732)
Credit for inclusion of that measure often goes to Rep Tom Watson of Georgia, though there had been efforts to establish rural delivery outside cities and towns since at least 1880. When it first began, the experimental service served patrons on five routes covering ten miles, but that soon became 82 routes by the time rural delivery became “official.” By the end of Fiscal 2024 (September 30, 2024) there were over 83,000 rural routes serving more than 51.5 million delivery points, about 30.6% of the nation’s total.
This short history suggests that the Post Office Department considered it important to provide rural customers with service that was as similar as possible to that enjoyed by customers in more urbanized places. Presumably, that should be the perspective of the Postal Service as well.
Efficiency
The 10-Year Plan produced by former postmaster general Louis DeJoy had scores of aspirational assurances about the wholesale improvements that would flow from The Plan’s initiatives, all yielding new-found “efficiency,” “precision,” and “optimization” that were unknown under prior postal administrations.
However, its measures to consolidate the processing facilities of the “misaligned” network, reduce costs for “underperforming” transportation (and air transportation in particular), merge the “disparate” mailflows of different products, and ease the “unattainable” service standards then in force have failed to yield service performance that is measurably better than what was provided at the start of the decade. Worse, now underway in facility service areas nationwide, the Regional Transportation Optimization initiative is arguably The Plan’s most egregiously hostile measure to the notion of providing comparable postal service to all Americans.
The US geography is large, and much of it is open spaces with few people, yet those people in those places need and deserve the same service from the USPS as do their fellow citizens in the big cities. Under RTO, however, they won’t get it. By his plan to make the network more “efficient,” DeJoy moved mail processing into fewer, larger facilities located close to population centers where higher volume could be developed, closing smaller facilities that were sited in less densely populated areas. Doing so, obviously, meant the distance from small towns to the processing centers grew, which added transportation time and cost.
Anxious to save money and get mail moving through the network earlier in the processing day, DeJoy found a way to do both by simply not providing the same transportation to distant offices as was done locally. Instead of a morning run to “remote” post offices to bring mail for delivery, and a second in the afternoon to gather collections, he moved to a morning-only trip, gathering the previous day’s collections at the same time. Thus his processing sites didn’t need to wait for what he belittled as an inconsequential amount of collection mail from places “200 miles away.” Welcome to RTO.
Unfortunately for DeJoy and his Plan, there are a lot of people living beyond the 50-mile distance from a plant that he chose as the RTO boundary. In fact, RTO will impact the majority of ZIP Codes in 46 of the lower 48 states and most of the population in 30 states; in six, over 90% of their population is affected. Nationally, 71% of ZIP Codes and 47% of the population will be impacted. Obviously, because the post offices not impacted by RTO are close to one of the designated processing sites, and because those are located near population centers, the majority –but not all – of the post offices and customers that are subject to RTO are in rural areas.
So, 132 years after the POD expanded service to rural America, the Postal Service is turning back time by decreasing service to millions of customers not just in rural areas who aren’t in easy proximity to a processing center. As we’ve observed before, the USPS is expected to provide service, and to all places and all customers equally, not just those people living where it can do so “efficiently.”