Canada

I don’t see why we can’t designate door-to-door mailing in sparsely populated areas and community mailboxes in more crowded places? Wouldn’t that save quite some money while still ensuring that people don’t have to spend ridiculous amounts of time to get their mail? I’d imagine that in more crowded places, because things are a bit more down in scale, people wouldn’t have to drive 20 minutes just to get their mail, and it would generally be a 5 minute walk.

We can do something more creative too. If there’s a nearby cafe or something, make that the community mailbox and people can grab their mail and have coffee. Your parcels would be away from the elements, and the cafe can become sort of a 3rd place. It’s more efficient land use!

We can also make community mailboxes have the ability to notify the people whenever there’s something in the mail, and people can subscribe to that system if they wish to (not everyone wants or can use digital ways of getting information). That way, it’s more difficult for people to forget about their mail. There definitely is a development cost and ongoing maintenance cost, but hey, it’s an option.

For those in sparsely populated areas, nothing much would change, if any. I think they could still have community mailboxes and just opt into it if it fits their lifestyle (eg, they choose to head out to the mailbox every Tues and Fri, for example). They can change their delivery option by going online or just visit a library or somewhere they can get a person to help them change their setting.

Is that a bit more work for postal workers to have to separate mail? It could be, but perhaps we could append some kind of token to the address to clearly distinguish door-to-door vs community mailboxes, making it easier to verify by eye, and also easier to automatically separate via a scanner if needed. Heck, could we just plaster a QR code to mail?

For those who changed their option, you might still get mail either in your community mailbox or your own mailbox, depending on what you’ve switched to.

Just spitballing here. There’s a lot you can argue about each idea, but there are many things we can do to be more efficient, make it less painful for our postal workers but also save out on cost.