A solution to the Post Office problem

Post office truck and mail delivery, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC.

These days, most local post offices no longer want to be located within commercial districts and downtowns in smaller towns. It's complicated, and not. Mostly, it's about transportation and distribution issues.

Most post offices do two things. They provide counter servcies. And they serve as the staging point for the organization of mail delivery for a particular geographic area.

The organization and distribution of mail requires lots of people and vehicles. When the vehicles aren't being used, they need to be stored. The vehicles need to be fixed when broken, etc.

In downtowns and neighborhood commercial districts, it's hard to have a lot of space for the transportation-distribution function of mail services.

So separate the functions. Keep the counter services operations, what we think of as "post offices," in downtowns and traditional commercial districts. Move, if necessary, the function of organizing and distributing mail.

SCOTT MANCHESTER / Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. Carrie Fischer of Santa Rosa prepares to mail a letter Thursday at the Santa Rosa downtown post office. The U.S. Postal Service took about 28,000 mailboxes out of service in the past year.