Why US post workers use imported vans
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ส.ค. 2023
- From 'Jet Lag: The Game', Sam Denby, Adam Chase and Ben Doyle face a question about vehicular vending.
LATERAL is a weekly podcast about interesting questions and even more interesting answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcast.com
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HOST: Tom Scott.
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RECORDED AT: The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett.
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Can we get a shoutout for the CC team doing the different pronunciations for "routes" all throughout the video? Holy SHIT, great job guys.
As a car enthusiast who grew up in a rural part of the US, this was just so incredibly obvious. It's how my family got their mail every day.
Same, it seemed so obvious i was surprised even one person didnt know the answer, but i suppose if you live in a city you wouldnt have experienced rural mail carriers.
@@raving_1074 Suburbia too. I was also surprised that not everyone knew, and figured it was a generational thing, but I guess if you grew up in deep urban area you wouldn't have experienced it.
Maybe it's been a while, but I remember right hand drive Jeep Cherokees serving this purpose. Maybe they were 80s vintage?
@@jero37 The old school Cherokees were extremely easy to retro-fit as right-sided driving, and they were also quite rugged/cheap. But I agree, I grew up in the boonies and all our rural carriers used old Cherokees.
Ok but it's not obvious to everybody that Japan drives on the left. A lot of people associate driving on the left only with the UK.
In Germany we manufactured a small electric van with the steering on the right specifically for the Deutsche Post, as one does.
Much like how Volkswagen produces sausages for its workers
@@TerribleUsernameAmirite ...and customers: they have a VW parts number, so you can order them at any self respecting VW dealership.
The US has done the same-- most prominently with the Grumman LLV, which is the standard white mail truck that you'll see across the US. And there are a few others-- Jeep made a right-hand-drive mail truck in the 50's, there was a small-ish run of Fords in the late '90s, and the LLV has a replacement coming in the form of the Oshkosh NGDV. (The first of those should hit the roads sometime late this year.)
US Postal Service also has custom American-built vehicles with right hand drive, but they're not very good at high speed, so I guess they chose to also get Japanese cars for the longer distance routes
@@arno_nuehmthat is delightfully odd; thank you!
In a real life example of this story. Once I was driving through rural Georgia and saw what would be considered a very rare sight in the continental US. It was a 1990s toyota Camry Wagon, touring addition, with 4wd, and an off road bumper. It was imported straight out of Japan and was right hand drive as you would expect. It was being used to deliver mail, most likely because it could handle the rough rural roads that the standard mail vans couldn't.
Did it have two wiper blades on the rear window?
Not only is it easier to reach the letterbox from a right hand drive car, but it's safer in urban environments to get out since you're not stepping near oncoming traffic, but rather on the sidewalk. I think UPS and such use right hand drive cars for such reasons.
UPS trucks are left-hand-drive but have the main door on the right school bus-style (which usually is kept open for neighborhood delivery routes). In their case, the ergonomics of a left-hand drive truck will generally be better, because a UPS driver won't be putting things in mailboxes by the side of the road but will be bringing packages from the back of the truck out that front right door (so you wouldn't want the driver's seat in the way).
But aren't UPS trucks left hand drive with a big slideing door on the right reachable from the driver's seat?
Exactly. That's the main point which they all failed to deliver.
Spoilers!
Omg it took my British brain so long to realise American post people never have to get out the car bc they have mailboxes on the driveway and not a flap in the front door 😂😂😂
It heavily depends on locale. Mailboxes are more common in suburban and rural areas, but in some places the mailbox is by the door rather than at the end of the driveway. Apartments often have cluster mailboxes (i.e. a bunch of mailboxes stuck together, like a private set of PO boxes), and in practice the postal workers do have to get out of their vehicles for those.
In *really* rural areas, there are places where the "driveway" is basically a small private road, and those usually do have the mailbox at the front of the driveway because it would be totally unreasonable to expect a mail truck to drive all the way up and down every single driveway on the route.
It depends. In many US cities the mailboxes are mounted on the front wall of the house, near the door. Suburban and rural areas have the street-side boxes.
@@myladycasagrande863I grew up not knowing mailboxes were real lol. In my neighborhood they put everything through the slot in the bottom of the door So it's just in your house when you get home and you pick it up
@@Auric-BraiNerd what about larger items like packages? Are they just left by the door?
In really rural areas of the US there's likely to be a cluster of mailboxes near where a dirt or gravel track joins the regular road. Every house on the side road has its own mailbox, and they're all in the same place so the mail carrier only has to stop once. I've lived in such a house, but we used a post office box in town.
Bonus hilarity:
1. There used to be a special kind of Jeep for this, with the item tag or "DJ" for delivering mail, but it was 2 wheel drive only.
2. Jeep actually makes right hand drive vehicles for various purposes today that you can find in the US, and ironically the one I remember is a Jeep JK that's used by the city of Denver for parking enforcement.
You can actually buy a RHD Jeep Wrangler as just a regular customer, they will sell you one
That's the thing I immediately thought of...Vehicles used for rural routes for the USPS is coincidentally among the reasons you can purchase a Wrangler in the UK.
Same here, it's those Jeeps that immediately sprung to mind and have me the correct answer from the start. As mentioned above, they used to sell off those Jeeps for a ridiculously low price. Unfortunately, having the steering wheel on the wrong side would be terrifying for anyone who has lived in countries where they drive on the right, as you would be constantly second-guessing yourself.
@@DuncanJimmy I still go looking for one from time to time, after reading an article about 10 years ago that declared that the Wrangler Unlimited to be the Defender 110 that Rover SHOULD make - except it was already in production, and you can even get it in RHD for that extra level of Defender purism - then the article had a long list of accessories you could get that would "Defenderize" your JKU, and since then there are some accessories that have come up that are _chef's kiss_ like the Red River Rigs Wrangler JXL campershell, which bolts right in and adds 15" and 50% more space behind the back seats - and gives the Unlimited the extra length behind the wheels to really LOOK like a Defender. Just throw some flat steel wheels on there _et voilá!_
The DJ-5 was the USPS version of the venerable CJ-5, and was built with RHD and RWD.
Given that it specified rural routes, I assumed it was going to be AWD. For a while Subaru had a patent monopoly on drive systems that could vary the power going to each wheel, which was great for black ice and mud and such (why they're known as an offroading brand). First one we got in winter 1992 the parents looked at things, took it for a test drive, planned to think about it overnight and their old car fishtailed out of the dealer lot. Turns out there was a patch of ice there the Subaru hadn't even noticed. We lived in the mountains and a lot of Subarus showed up over the next few years as word got around.
I didn't take rural to mean "vs paved roads" but to mean "vs urban". Where I am we have a lot of rural farm land that the cities grew to butt right up next to. You'll be driving on a road densely packed with houses which suddenly has much less frequent driveways for a time before suddenly becoming densely packed again in the next city.
In urban areas however our mail vans park at a corner and they get out and walk up and down a couple streets hand delivering mail to homes because there are no mailboxes on the street.
Much less driving in our urban areas, or at least 99% of the driving doesn't involve delivering mail from the vehicle.
That and the only Subaru I've been in is a WRX. I'm sure it could get the job done, but it is a little overkill for delivering mail ;)
@@lorddissy I imagined rural the same way, but in a "more sparse = less road upkeep" sense. Even in the city we've got roads that the plows don't bother with.
Your read on it makes sense.
I would imagine it was a combination of the two. There might have been 4WD station wagons in the US (Though not many) but none of them would be available in a right-hand-drive configuration.
Subaru spent so much time advertising themselves with an Australian spokesperson on the radio that as a kid I thought the company was Australian.
“Subaru” for the record, is the Japanese name for the Pleiades star cluster, which is actually what their logo is.
I knew the thing about the stars. Not about the Austrailian advertisings. We got the "Here is a Subaru, it's big and small, its got AWD and a turbo".
I got it straight away. I thought about UPS drivers having their doors open and it came to me.
Another fun fact for this is Jeep, after the subaru thing, made a bunch of right hand drive vehicles for the US to replace those subarus. I went to school with someone who had one. Oddly I learned to drive in a 1960s mail truck that was used in vietnam. It was used as a farm truck for my dads dad. It had a wooden seat which was AWFUL to sit on while driving through texas pastures.
As far as I know, you can still order a Wrangler in right-hand drive!
Actually I think the Subarus replaced RHD Jeeps used previously. Eventually Jeep did start selling RHD Wranglers through dealers in the US for commercial customers like USPS contractors.
@@AutoReport1 oh weirdly just a few weeks after making this comment we hired a new guy at my job who drove one of these right hand drive jeeps.
The Jet Lag team recently filmed in Japan. I wonder if this was recorded before or after that.
Comedian Steve Carell used to be a mailman! But he had to use his own car lol.
“I think only like the really senior delivery people had the official trucks, so I had to use my Toyota, which had a bench seat. And I would steer with one hand with my foot over here on the gas… and I would sit in the passenger seat and deliver the mail out the right side.”
Two interesting tidbits on this (contains spoilers, don’t read if you haven’t yet watched the episode)
In the US Virgin Islands, cars drive on left (because the USVI were a territory of Denmark before the US purchased them in 1917, and Denmark used to drive on the left back in 1917???) but, because they are American and have to buy cars approved by the US DOT, essentially all the cars in the USVI are left hand drive. I’ve driven in literally a dozen different countries around the world, including Australia, nothing was as difficult as driving on the left side of narrow, steep, twisting roads in a left hand drive car!
In Pennsylvania I’ve seen rural mail carriers (who are perhaps independent contractors and have to provide their own vehicle??) drive standard left hand drive cars from the right seat, using a stick to push the pedals and reaching across to turn the wheel.
In The Netherlands the postman rides a bicycle or a moped. This makes sense because in rural areas the letterboxes are most of the time along a bicycle path.
I just googled this. And a car is actually forbidden for a postman.
Nope. Some postmen have cars. There are some lonely houses along long empty roads here too.
Postmen use bikes and mopeds in Denmark as well. Hardly surprising considering how much our countries use bike in general really
My rural British postman has a forty-mile round, I don't think you could do that on a moped and carry all the mail you need to. Plus we have these strange thing you've probably never heard of called "hills".
I’m guessing there isn’t much mail to be delivered in the Netherlands. Just for fun I weighed today’s mail, 650g, for a fairly typical Tuesday delivery for me and my husband. At just 100 customers averaging that weight of mail per customer, that’s 65kg (143lbs) probably a reasonable load for a bike, but I don’t think it would be very efficient to deliver to just 100 people before going back to get the next batch. I think my mail carrier delivers to at least 600 homes every day, perhaps more.
(And yes, what ever happened to the “paperless” future I was promised back in the mid-1990’s???
I’m in no way suggesting that the volume of utter crap sent through the USPS is in any way a good thing!)
@@jpe1you get around 20 kg of mail per month? Like, really? I don't think mine would add up to even 1 kg typically
I've seen a couple of cars in Canada, usually Hondas, that are RHD and specifically for Canada Post.
Subaru because associated with Lesbians first, basically randomly... then they leaned into it and the association grew. Then they went through the very difficult transitions as lesbians became less stigmatized and thus less likely to buy a car based on their in-group and at the same time, it was a limited market, at only 5% of the population. So they had to distance themselves from the association without coming across anti-LGBT. They managed to do it with great difficulty.
Still popular amongst politically/culturally left leaning rural drivers (vs. a pickup truck.)
@@dwarftoad Or just anyone who wants a 4WD in a chassis smaller than a huge-ass truck/SUV.
I heard this on the podcast, and post-listening realised a few things:
1) They were probably UK-spec, since UK-spec cars have the same stalk layout as the US and continental Europe (indicators on the left, wipers on the right), while Japan-spec cars have them flipped. Easier for the drivers to adjust.
2) They would have probably modified them before putting them into service because the headlights on all cars are designed to throw more light to the side of the road and less into oncoming traffic - an RHD car driven on the right side of the road would be throwing light into oncoming traffic (because it's designed to be driven on the left) so they would have had to replace the headlight modules with US-spec ones to avoid that.
Looked into it, and it looks like it was actually a custom "Right Hand Postal Drive" model created for this specific purpose. They were generally bought by contractors rather than owned by USPS.
At first I thought it was the CAFE standards, which pushed the station wagon out of existence, but then I remembered the mail lady pulling up to our mailbox and reaching with her grabbing tool pull mail out and put it in.
My first guess, right off the bat, was that the USPS had a debt inbalance with the postal services of other countries (since maybe we sent other countries more mail than they sent us), so those postal services repaid us in cars. My second guess, midway through, was that a foreign vehicle might have the driver's seat and steering wheel on the right side of the vehicle, not the left. This would be desirable, since postal employees drive on the right side of the road but also need to deposit mail in mailboxes that sit on the right shoulder of the road.
Ive seen rural postal drivers use those Driver's Ed remote wheel rigs to drive, and they scare the snot out of me 😅
Immediately got it, mildly surprised was even a question, but I grew up on a rural route.
This one I actually guessed from the title alone. I drive mail myself in Sweden and most postal vans are 2015-2018 VW Caddy's that are right hand drive. Probably imported from UK or put together in Sweden or Germany.
I don't recall if I noticed this when the video was new, but I love that the subtitling team went to the effort of adding ruby text to distinguish Tom's two pronunciations of 'routes'
Just popping in to say that people in Colorado really do like Subarus. And now I will finish watching the video
In Italy we also have some vehicles in which the steering wheel is on the right side of the car, even though they keep the right side of the road. These vehicles are not used by the postal service, but by the service that collects the trash
I havent heard the answer yet. But im gonna say this, I believe they imported because it's right hand drive, which postal workers use today to make things easier.
Edit post video: I'm so happy that I actually know one of these right off the bat.
Three things about Subarus, rimless windows, four wheel drive, boxer engines
Driver seats on the right because Japan drive on the left, easier to access the mailbox from the driver seat. It comes with US postal regulation that the mailbox must be accessible from the driver seating in the van.
But that answer was easier for me as Thailand also drive on the left side of the road.
The normal postal truck in the US was built by Grumman who became very well known for their line of very good Navy fighters. They gave their planes feline nicknames such as the Wildcat, Hellcat, Bearcat and Tomcat.
Living in the country I got this right away.
Also, all Subaru vehicles are all wheel drive.
Much better for driving in bad weather.
here in AUS (LH traffic, RH drive) I've lived in a places where where the letter boxes are on the RH side of the route and the posties pull over to the "wrong" side of the road to make deliveries
I carried mail for the US Post Office Department (the predecessor of the US Postal Service) in urban areas in the late 60s. I immediately knew the answer - rare for me on this channel. I knew because our vehicles way back then were also right-side drive.
I got this immediately from watching a Sam’s video on UPS trucks lmao
My dingleberry of a rural route post office driver had a Chevy Equinox that he sat on the right side of with the pedals but the steering wheel was still on the left. IDK how he did that everyday.
This is a question that for most Americans, should come to mind right away.
This is a pretty easy question for any American who was a vague idea of how our postal system works.
For once, I actually knew the answer to this question right away. I've seen one of these Subarus working in the mountains of North Carolina where they need the AWD. I remember it distinctly cause it had USPS written on it, and at first glance, there was no driver (he was on the wrong side).
In the UK, postmen have to get out their vehicle and put the post through the letter box. British people are less likely to get this answer as quick as Sam.
Typically they take an entire trolley out and do an section on foot especially with terraces/row houses.I guess these rural route are so sparely populated they can have all the mail in the front.
I’m British but I thought of it as quickly as Sam did. 😊
@@dirtywaterpj_dj Nice. I did say unlikely.
Really? It seemed like such an obvious thing to do for rural mail handling I would have thought that a lot of places would do it.
UK posties also tend not to do 'double-ups' anymore either (i.e. two posties in one vehicle on one round), which this question is predicated on, since the driver is on the left in the subaru and therefore someone else is on the right side reaching out to the mailboxes.
Edited: actually forget that, I think I've messed that up, and now I think that the whole point might be to enable the US posties to not have to do double-ups either.
i heard similar thing about some type of bicycle post workers use , not sure what and why, only know something about bicycle and postmen back in the days.
I called this right from the start, I'm unreasonably proud of myself
This was one of those where being right-hand-drive was so obvious I almost said it before the question was even asked in full.
I immediately assumed that was the answer based on the video title, and then I heard Tom's phrasing of the question on the call and doubted myself. Subaru Legacy station wagons was a surprise, and the specific timing of the importation seemed wrong based on what little I know.
Were station wagons common USPS delivery vehicles back then? I have memories of the 90s but no memories of postal workers or vehicles in the 90s.
only on rural routes
This actually got a call out in the Marvel series Echo. The title character's grandma is a letter carrier, and her pickup truck has the wheel on the right side for this very reason.
I had the answer right away thanks to my Jeep Cherokee that has that characteristic also !
love how tom even spelt it suburu
In Sweden, all postal cars, for as long as I can remember, have had the steering wheel on the "wrong" side.
I figured this out immediately the same as Sam. I feel quite smart right now lol
Had zero idea about the right answer - growing up in the UK, postmen/women actually had to be on foot to deliver letters and packages. Obviously, they might drive to a particular location/area, but at some point, would have to walk up to each home/building to deliver stuff.
They walk in urban/suburban areas in the US also. This is for the rural areas where there can be miles between houses and the mailbox is on a post on the side of the road.
I knew this one off the thumbnail because my paternal grandmother drove a mail van for a while and Canada did the same thing for the same reason.
I don't know about the '90s, but Subaru has a plant in Lafayette, Indiana. Maybe that's only because they took off as a brand in the US in the '90s.
Couple of minutes in, assuming this has to do with the steering wheel being on the opposite side, making it easier to deliver mail without stepping out of the car when you pass postboxes.
Canadian posties just politely ask their lead dog to do it, eh . . . : )
I believe that Subaru was building LHD Legacys in the US at this point, so importing the RHD versions wasn't quite as blatant a "not made here" purchase as it could have been.
Growing up in the 70s, my neighbor was a mail carrier, he used a normal left hand drive car but drove on the right side of the car, i never asked him how he did that, I always imagined he had an extra set of petals.
I didn't think this question would last more than 5 sec. I thought right hand drive mail trucks would have been common knowledge but then I was trying to guess off the wall because the answer was too obvious that I dismissed it.
i worked in the postal industry so knew the answer immediately.
This was so painfully obvious it hurt that they didn't immediately get it.
I'm hurting with you. I am genuinely wondering how these contestants make a bowl of cereal without setting it on fire.
Are the two contestants British? It’s immediately obvious to most Americans but wouldn’t be obvious to Brits.
I had this one figured out from the title, before the question was even read.
In Australia we just make it so that rural mailboxes can be accessed easily from the drivers side. Which also works out when you collect your mail on the way home.
Cheaper and simpler solution.
The steering wheel on the correct side! It means that the lance can be held in the left hand during car jousting. 🥴
"it likes to be driven hard and put away wet" -an actual 90s subaru ad. the others were equally unsubtle
This is the first one that i got Instantly, kinda feel smart for once.
Americans may be wondering why British mail vans don't do the same (well, not the same, but the equivalent on the other side) thing. The answer is that they have to get out of their vehicle to deliver mail, because people have what are known as letterboxes in their front door where you push mail through into their house, not those things that Americans have outside their homes next to the road for mail/post.
The mailboxes on the side of the road are for Rural Routes where there can be miles of road between houses and miles of driveway between the road and house.
In cities the mailbox is next to the door and the mail carriers will walk door to door.
ETA the longest postal route in the US is 187 miles (300km).
3:15 The USPS would buy American if they could, but instead their most recent purchase of right hand drive vehicles (since 2020) has been the Mercedes Metris.
Guessing right off the bat it's because of which side the driver sits on. :P
And Sam figured it out immediately too!
Not too difficult to imagine a diffferent world where they'd have imported Landrover Defenders or something like that. The critical difference however is that you're more likely to find an automatic transmission Subaru Legacy/Outback in that period of time than a landy.
I grew up in NYC, my mail people walked.
It is very infrequently that I know these right away. I assumed there was some other twist I didn't understand.
Isn't Subaru Australian? Hence the southern cross as the emblem, and names such as Outback?
It was only recently that I realised we build Japanese cars in the UK because they drive on the left too. Spotted it during the Tokyo Olympics.
Incidentally most islands drive on the left and most continents drive on the right. There's a reason for this, probably covered in a Tom Scott video!
Another fun fact about subaru is spelling it backwards is calling someone a bus. Urabus.
Re: Tom's comment about them buying American if they could... technically, Ford makes cars for the UK too (albeit via a subsidiary, Ford of Europe), so that would've been a bit more American.
I got it straight away.
I had a similar light bulb moment thinking that, being specifically a rural driving matter, manual transmission would have made enormous sense to have.
Subarus are not necessarily imports in the US. Mine was made (with at least some imported parts) in Indiana. Sam may know that Subarus are extraordinarily popular in Colorado, in part because they handle far better than most makes in snow and ice conditions.
Ah yes, my favorite car brand, Suburu.
My name is also Sam. I was also 95% sure I knew the answer despite never having heard this before.
Why Subaru and not, say, a British or Australian Ford or Holden (GM)? Is it because Subaru models were both not so rare (easy to maintain and fix) and generally identical in the US vs. Japan? (Except drive side.) (Plus it's a station wagon vs. a truck that would be harder to use.... American SUVs were not as common until the mid/late 90s, and were truck-based; car-based crossovers didn't appear until several years later.)
You had a Subaru in Colorado??? I have never seen one here.
i had the lightbulb moment at the exact same time as adam but i was right with it
I got this immediately, because my wife is English and I regularly drive in England.
Adam, you said the same thing about lesbians and the marketing about 3-5 different ways. Bravo for clarity.
This is such a obvious thing, but alle the delivery companies in my country don't use it. They always have to step out on the road side.
yes i knew it im just like sam i knew it from the very beginning
Damn, Adam still has his microphone facing the wrong way
Knew this one.
Why only in the 90's? What vans do they use now?
The wheel is not just on the righthand side but it's on the right side.
So we have a positive example of a dogwhistle. Neat.
Don't see this yet... Garbage trucks (trash haulers) in US/Can typically have either right hand drive or dual-position drive.
0:25 I see your captioners are getting more deaf-friendly
That was an easy one.
Also got this instantly... and then assumed it must be something else, because that was too obvious... right? ... right!? 💁🏻♂🤣
I know the answer just by looking at the thumbnail before the video starts
I bet they want to get out on the kerbside. Edit: Nice it literally just hit me instantly.
I thought it was gonna be about the chicken tax
omg i think i know it
Guessed it from the title.