I should say up front that switching any portion of the USPS delivery fleet from gas to electric will be an improvement, and the plan announced yesterday is good news. Still, this part kind of sucks: The Postal Service is restructuring its vast mail processing and delivery network to... explodingcomma.com

@petebrown To be honest, I feel like they could replace letter and small package delivery with some sort of drone + mailbox standardization (where USPS issues a mailbox to each home). This would handle a majority of non-urban delivery cheaply over the long term.

For a majority of mail they could probably just drive a truck from centralized sorting facilities to outlying cities/towns, release the drones, then drive back.

The humans would continue delivering to apartment settings as well as medium and large package delivery.

I’m oversimplifying, but I do feel like an investment this direction would pay off. I also feel like the reality of this would be incredibly creepy :). Maybe not as much if it all happened overnight.