Postal Service Lacks Funds to Repair, Replace Aging Truck Fleet, GAO Study Finds

This story appears in the May 30 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

The U.S. Postal Service, like many commercial fleets, is facing the problems of an aging truck fleet, including burgeoning maintenance costs, but lacks the financial resources to do anything about it, a new government study found.

The Postal Service “operates the world’s largest civilian vehicle fleet, with more than 215,000 vehicles, of which about 192,000 are delivery vehicles,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a report to Congress earlier in May.

“The majority of USPS’s delivery fleet is composed of custom-built, right-hand-drive, light-duty delivery trucks that it refers to as ‘long-life vehicles,’ vehicles built with an aluminum body and other features intended to permit an extended operational life of 24 years,” GAO said. “Purchased from 1987 to 1994, the LLVs are now approaching the end of their expected operational lives.”

However, because “USPS’s financial condition continues to deteriorate,” said the Postal Service “for the foreseeable future, cannot afford to replace or refurbish a large portion of its aging fleet,” Phillip Herr, GAO’s director of physical infrastructure issues, told a congressional committee May 17.

“For the first six months of fiscal year 2011, USPS reported a net loss of $2.6 billion — worse than it expected — and that, absent legislative change, it will have to default on payments to the government, including a $5.5 billion payment for its retiree health benefits,” he said.

Herr also said that GAO analyzed Postal Service data, visited Postal Service facilities, and interviewed Postal Service and other officials to compile its report.

“GAO recommended in that report that USPS should develop a strategy for addressing its delivery fleet needs that considers the effects of likely operational changes, legislative fleet requirements, and other factors,” Herr said. “USPS agreed with the recommendation.”

He said the specially built delivery vans, while more expensive than off-the-line vehicles, lasted twice as long in Postal Service conditions of “an average of about 500 stops and starts per delivery route per day.”

He said that under the Energy Policy Act of 1992, 75% of the light-duty vehicles the Postal Service acquires “must be capable of using an alternative fuel such as ethanol, natural gas, propane, biodiesel, electricity or hydrogen.”

He said that since 2000, “USPS has consistently purchased delivery vehicles that can operate on gasoline or a mixture of gasoline and 85% ethanol, [or] E85, to satisfy this requirement.” However, he added, “according to Department of Energy data, as of December 2009, E85 was not available at 99% of U.S. fueling stations.”

Herr said the Postal Service chose those vehicles because in part its “officials expected that E85 eventually would be widely available throughout the United States.”

Postal Service spokeswoman Sue Brennan said current-technology alternative fuel vehicles were difficult to fit in with delivery routes, but that the agency was committed to alternative fuels.

“Considering all vehicular delivery routes, the average Postal mail delivery vehicle travels 17 miles per day, consuming 1.5 to 2 gallons of fuel per day,” Brennan told Transport Topics.

“So far, we have not found an alternative fuel vehicle solution, flex-fuel or otherwise, in which savings from factors such as reduced maintenance, fuel, and other costs would offset the incremental acquisition investment and infrastructure costs for these vehicles,” she said.

GAO also found that maintenance costs were rising.

“Our analysis showed that while about 77% of its delivery vehicles incurred less than $3,500 in direct annual maintenance costs in fiscal year 2010, about 3%, 5,349 of these vehicles, required more than $7,000 — and 662 vehicles required more than $10,500, in direct annual maintenance costs,” Herr said.

He added that GAO found that some Postal Service maintenance facilities were using shortcuts because of a lack of resources.

“For example, officials at a Minnesota vehicle maintenance facility told us that they are not following USPS’s requirements for replacing frames whose thickness in key spots indicates weakness because they do not have the resources to do so,” Herr said. “Instead, they said, facility personnel replace frames only when the frames have one or more holes through the metal.”

The Postal Service requested that a statement be submitted with the GAO report.

“The USPS travels over 1.2 billion miles per year to provide a trusted, affordable mail service to our 150 million addresses across our nation,” Dean Granholm, vice president of USPS delivery and post office operations, said in the statement.

“Our vehicle fleet is critical to the successful completion of our mission,” he added. “Our fleet preventive maintenance program has been instrumental in allowing us to sustain all of our vehicles in our delivery fleet.”

He said the Postal Service was “gathering data” on the next steps to improve its fleet.