Mail Trucks and Energy Usage

I just spoke with the mail carrier delivering junk mail to my home. I noticed he uses a special kind of vehicle designed specifically for the purpose of delivering mail. It's small and would seem to be quite economical to run. I first asked him what fuel it used. He said gasoline and that it only got about 7 or 11 miles per gallon. That's amazingly bad. My big car probably gets 28 mpg. He also described a couple of the other vehicles the Postal Service uses and how they all have terrible mileage. He contributed that it was probably because of their stop-and-go driving. They also wear out their tires and starters (they stop the engine each time they leave the vehicle and restart it when they return).

My first comment is, OMG that's incredibly bad mileage and you would almost have to go out of your way to create such a horrible fuel usage rate.

My second comment is, there has to be a better way.

That brings me to the obvious alternatives to consider: vehicles without starters or energy usage based on stops & starts -- electric vehicles.

Many kinds of vehicles run only in cities have short ranges and aren't often far from their refueling stations (e.g. taxis, buses, delivery vans, mail carriers, etc.) Why should these specialized fleets of vehicles be used when they are obviously not the best designs for this kind of driving? Electric vehicles do not stop and start the way an internal combustion engine does and they don't need a starter like those. Their energy use isn't related to the stop and go nature of city driving. And, when you compare energy usage an e-vehicle is very good compared to normal usage gasoline cars, so they would be tremendously better than these low mileage special vehicles.

Cities need to begin switching to vehicles like the new Chevy Bolt (for small one-person driving like mail carriers) for short-range in-city driving. The current e-cars can get about 300 miles per charge and many fleet vehicles don't drive that much in a day. Soon there will be batteries which charge quickly and then range will become a much smaller issue.

Activist governments which want to save on maintenance and fuel/energy costs should look at the cost/benefit analyses on these choices to be sure their cities or companies aren't losing out on a great opportunity.