Does it make sense economically for the USPS to keep paying for repairs on the Grumman LLV delivery vehicle?

curtisports2

I drove one for almost 30 years. The first of them in our area went into service in 1987. They were intended to last 20 years. LLV stands for 'Long Life Vehicle'. The bodies have held up better than expected. Mechanically, not so much. Functionally, they have outlived their usefulness. Package volume, even with Amazon taking back some, is far above what the vehicles were designed to handle. The problem has been with finding a replacement. There are supposedly five different prototypes being built or already built in some cases, with testing ongoing, but no decision has been made. The 2006 fiasco with Congress - in a completely bipartisan effort, I don't want to hear 'those damn Republicans', the turd passed both House and Senate by VOICE VOTE - that saddled USPS with $5 billion a year in mandated payments to a 'fund' for future healthcare costs running out to 75 years - is what killed the agency's ability to replace its aging fleet. NO private business, and NO other government agency, pre-pays employee health insurance. And this money never went to pay for health insurance. Congress took that money in a massive shell game, to make their deficits look smaller on the books. As a result, USPS had no choice but keep putting bandaids on the problem. There was talk of building new chassis to fir existing bodies to and that might have worked except for the fact that today's mail volume and package volume are too much for these vehicles to handle. "Wait," you say..."too much mail volume? I thought volume has declined sharply." First class mail volume per person has declined due to electronic communications, that's true. But there are more and more people and more and more unique addresses every year to counter some of that, and advertising mail volume is up, not down. In addition, automation has cut processing and sorting time by carriers in the office to barely an hour each morning, compared with an average of almost three hours 30 years ago. Carriers picked up all that time on the street. In my city, automation saw a reduction in the number of routes across all zip codes by close to 50% while serving a lot more addresses each year. The LLVs just can't hold it all - efficiently.

JetDoc

AS long as they CAN be repaired and continued in service, it's still cheaper than buying a whole new fleet of custom built delivery vehicles.

STEVEN F

Properly maintained, they can last forever. Without proper maintenance, none of them would have lasted 10 years.

Joshua

The only other option is to buy new vehicles.

Anonymous

It is the USPS. They have no concept of making a PROFIT.

Pearl L

it nnight nnake sense to the post office since they need thenn

ProgressUSA

Get rid of the Republicans so the government can get what it needs