When will our neighborhood get door-to-door USPS mail delivery?
To the best of my understanding, getting mail delivered actually to your door is something that only happens in places that are densely populated. In areas where the mail carrier has long routes where they travel by automobile and not on foot (and not the city way of travelling where you drive the mail truck, park it and deliver mail by hand on the street, get back in the truck, drive a few blocks, park it etc) this one side of the road delivery ensures that they can deliver all the mail on a long route without having to cross the street or drive up and down each street. In the town where my house is, the mail carrier’s route is 90 miles long. There is no way he could do this if he were delivering mail to both sides of the street or stopping at every house. So, in short, if you have a route where the carrier stays in his/her vehicle and it’s a long route, chances for to-the-door mail delivery are unlikely.
This is why I’d suggest talking to the postmaster. How the area has grown, how your post office is classified, and what the routes of the mail carriers are like all factor in to how the mail gets delivered. I’m sure there’s a reason why mail delivery in your neighborhood is like it is, whether it’s a good reason is another matter entirely. There really isn’t any right to fair and equal mail service in the USPS (the price of identically-sized PO boxes fluctuates depending on the classification of the specific post office, for example, nothing at all fair about that) there is a right to basic minimum services which varies depending on all sorts of things. Where I live, I’m too close to the post office to even get mail delivery at my home so they give me a PO Box for free. Any mail addressed to my street/home address gets returned to sender. I used to have a fierce white hot anger burning in my heart for the post office, so I feel your pain. Here are the classifications for post offices.
I’m sure that (as jessamyn said), part of it has to do with the presence of sidewalks and/or previously established curbside mailboxes. In my small city, my older neighborhood has sidewalks and hence door service, yet a nearby similarly-dense newer neighborhood was built without sidewalks and had mailboxes installed, so that’s how their mail is delivered. In 1978, the Postal Service declared that every new development must have curbside delivery or mailboxes at a central location. If the U.S. Postal Service could, however, virtually every neighborhood nationwide would have curbside delivery, said Gary Sawtelle, spokesman for the Suncoast district. “It’s a more efficient form of delivery for us.” He said the service has not offered door delivery as an option in new communities since at least the mid-1990s.
Population density may or may not be a factor in this (certainly when I’ve lived in urban areas the mail has always been delivered to my building), but I definitely have noticed a correlation between the age of a neighborhood and whether or not the mail is delivered to the door. In neighborhoods built within the past 20 years or so, it seems it’s much more common to have mailbox trees, whereas in older neighborhoods I’ve always seen mail carriers either walking or driving door-to-door.
