Rivians started showing up around here at the start of the school year. Both the trucks and the SUV. I suspect a high percentage of their pre-orders were here, in SE Michigan.
Bezos is switching his fleet to electric. This was in the news monts ago. USPS had a contract to go electric, but the shithead TFG appointed Post Master General cancelled the contract.
Are you asking if there are lots of republicans with excess money who waste it in ways specifically designed to make themselves as offensive and belligerent to polite society as possible?
Thank Dog! The sooner my letter carrier can dump his smelly, ancient Jeep, the better! (I sure do hope they’re eliminating the oldest vehicles in the fleet first - this is the same Jeep my former letter carrier was driving when I moved into my house 16 years ago. )
Do they not use bikes in the US? The post here does have (electric) vans and has been electric for a few years now but actual house deliveries are done by push bike and the odd electric assist bike.
Amazon has been electric here for a couple of years. Off the peg electric vans. Nothing fancy.
It’s the freelancers that aren’t electric. Capital v running costs hit them.
Delivery methods vary by neighborhood. In rural areas a postal worker will often drive up to a roadside mailbox but in other places they’ll walk door to door on foot delivering a satchel of mail at a time either from a truck parked nearby or from a local postal relay box.
No, postal carriers in the US do not ride bicycles. Impractical, even in cities. For example, it snowed 7" the other day and the post our carrier is based out of is about 4 miles away. Plus, he covers about half our neighborhood of 700 houses…
I hear you but the number of houses isn’t a problem. Nor is the snow really. That’s an issue of snowplows clearing the road for cars. Into the cycle lane. And leaving the pavements, which is actually where most posties cycle, uncleared. This is a big issue for older people in particular who depend on local shops and services.
But I will bang on about liveable cities ad nauseum if allowed to so I should shut up!
Where i am snow mostly never happens*, when it does chaos ensues.
The previous time snow happened enough to be an issue, fun ensued.
My local train station, it’s elevated, and crosses a major road at 90 degrees (6 lanes total). The council salted all the road lanes, left the pedestrian pathway under the same bridge untouched. Water drips from the above rail lines froze the pathway solid**, which lead to the first lane of road getting comandeered by pedestrians, which caused further hilarity.
I do find it a bit odd that roads get salted but major pathways do not…
*SE UK, we get enough snow to settle maybe once every 3-5years or so
**like 1cm thick ice
As a parent (and now a caretaker of elderly parents) wherever I go I first notice any sharp corners where someone could bang their head and end up in the ER.
From the angles I saw in the announcement I assumed in close inspection they would have rounded edges and corners. Now it’s pretty clear they just cut metal and attached panel against panel and called it done.
Like I assumed it would be more refined as a mass-market product than the impractical-seeming first-impression.
I can imagine the sort of “make the tip of the rocket pointy so it looks badass” kind of conversation, and engineers just cringe whenever he says confidently “turns out there’s no real reason why rockets need to have a rounded nose.”