Are there any publicly available stats for USPS mail delivery time?

August 11, 2020 6:38 PM

If I want to see how long a letter with a first-class stamp would take to get to Arizona, based on the current reported increase in delivery times, is there some way to verify that average delivery time independently of the USPS's own numbers? For example, a a site with an API I can query with two zip codes? Should there be?
posted by paul_smatatoes to Technology (4 answers total)

This has been sitting unanswered for a bit, but I'm fairly certain the answer is "no", for the following reasons:

• How would one obtain independent data? The only way to measure this independently is to track a lot of deliveries, which would require some (likely expensive and/or time-consuming) coordination for anyone outside of the USPS. I'm not aware of any sort of coordination like this.
• Who would want this data? It might be useful if someone suspects the official data to be suspect, and wants to verify it, but you run into the How problem pretty early, and I can't imagine anyone willing to go through the expense of solving that. Competitors might possibly be interested in independent data, but I don't see any evidence that they do such data-gathering.
• Why would anyone with independent data publish it in any form, let alone an API? If you're doing investigative journalism, you just need to send a handful of letters and report on it; you're not going to have the time or budget to set up anything that functions at scale. If you're a competitor, any data you might collect would be proprietary information. Anything at scale would cost a lot to implement, so then you need to figure out who's going to pay for this data, and there's not a market for it that I can tell.

posted by Aleyn at 7:19 PM on August 12, 2020

They don’t publish anything like it as far as I know, but a shipping API company like EasyPost or ShipStation could probably publish aggregate data like this for tracked packages.

But first class mail is (always? usually?) untracked, so to collect this sort of data for a significant number of ZIP codes would require collecting the travel times of a bunch of letters outside of what the USPS already tracks.
posted by jimw at 10:03 PM on August 12, 2020

I think this data doesn't exist for the reasons enumerated above. I also think the delays are not related to travel time. I am in Chicago and had two packages -- one from Ohio and one from Denver -- sit in my local facility for roughly the same amount of time (have been at the facility since August 5/6); both were delivered yesterday. So the backup doesn't seem to be related to where the package came from, but from the local facility's delivery restrictions.
posted by quadrilaterals at 7:35 AM on August 13, 2020

Hey, you're in luck--the NY times just published something on this. It may not be as granular as you're looking for, but it's better than nothing.

Is the Mail Getting Slower? We’re Tracking It
posted by Quiscale at 8:31 PM on September 14, 2020