Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren vogelbam Here. Neither snow nor rain, nor heat nor gloom of night keeps your loyal mailman from making their daily rounds in their powder blue shirt, gray shorts, and occasionally awesome safari hat. But how exactly did your trustee mail carrier get assigned the specific route? And how long are they stuck with it? The US Postal Service was established by the Constitution, and the first Postmaster General was
named by George Washington. In nine The new country was served by seventy five post offices, delivering to four million people. According to Sue Brennan at the United States Postal Service, your mail carrier's current route is one of more than seventy four thousand rural postal routes and nearly a hundred
and forty five thousand city routes across the nation. The longest single route in America is in Magnum, Oklahoma, where a well traveled world carrier drives a hundred and eighty three miles that's two kios every day to serve two undering forty eight customers. The shortest route is in Athens, Georgia, where a city carrier walks nine d and fifty feet that's two hundred nine ms to make two hundred and
eighty one deliveries. We spoke with Brian Renfrow. He's a second generation letter carrier from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, currently serving as the executive vice president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, a labor union representing America's two hundred thousand city postal workers. Renfrow explained to us the process by which an individual postal route is designed and assigned for starters. Renfrow says rural carriers and city carriers have different systems for determining
the size of a route. A rural carrier's route is much more consistent, and they are paid for the amount of time it takes them to complete the route. For city carriers, the guiding principle of route design is for a carrier to complete the route in as close to eight hours as possible. As you can imagine, an eight hour route looks a lot different depending on your location. In a dense urban center full of high rise apartments, it might take a postal worker eight hours to serve
us a couple of blocks out in the suburbs. Another postal worker might walk and drive miles delivering two single family homes. The size and dimensions of each route are calculated using a combination of computer based mapping software and old fashioned on the ground experience. Renfrew said. The postal service has a computer program that maps the exact location of every delivery point, not just this house is here,
but where the mailbox is. And this program uses a number of algorithms to try to generate the most efficient way to travel the route based on the time value that's assigned to each street. The computer's timing of the route is just a starting point, though after that it's the postal manager's job to account for reality, which includes all the variables that can impact the time it takes to complete a route. There are seasonal fluctuations in mail volume.
There's inclement weather, there's road construction and new home construction, and the very human differences between one carrier and the next, Renfrew said. Some letter carriers are tall, some are short, some are young, some are older, some are faster, some are slower. There are all sorts of variables that play into it. There's no set time to deliver mail at a particular house, the postal carrier has to spend a few hours sorting the mail into trays before heading out
on their route. The trays correspond to the order of the route. If the house is ahead of you on the route happened to be heavier on mail than usual on any given day, the letters may get to your box later than on another day, even if the weather is good and there's no road construction or other delays. Keeping the roots as close to eight hours as possible
requires regular adjustments. Postal managers will conduct six day root inspections to accurately time each part of the letter carrier's day, from the daily morning sorting to the on the street delivery to hanging up their bag at night. If a carrier's day is stretching closer to eight and a half hours, the postal manager will slice off a portion of that route and divvy it up among nearby carriers with lighter loads. That explains why you might see a new face on
your route every couple of years. Otherwise, the assigning of roots at any given post office is done by seniority. When a route is vacated, the carrier quits or retires, or a new one is created, all the carriers in the office get too bid on the route, the carrier with the most seniority wins. If you've had the same letter carrier for a long time, that probably means you're part of a desirable route, or those cookies you gave them on National Postal Worker Day July one are really
paying off. In addition to the long term root adjustments that are made every few months or years, the Postal Service also makes short term root fixes. When letter carriers show up to work every morning, they look at the day's mail volume and make an estimate of how long it will take to complete their assigned route. Maybe it's a snow day or a day after a government holiday, so the delivery volume is doubled. If they know it's going to take more than eight hours, they can either
volunteer for overtime. Overtime sign ups are every three months, or the supervisor can assign a portion of the route to other carriers for the day. Renfrew notes that though this may sound simple in practice, it can get complicated fast. Individual post offices in big cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Boston might have to hundred to three hundred letter carriers to manage, each with hundreds of ever changing customers to deliver to. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse
and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeartMedia's How Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other topics that deliver, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com. And for more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.