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Wednesday 31 March 2010

Save the Mailstar

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The Pashley Mailstar is an instantly recognisable British institution.  It is no Yuba Mundo or Madsen Bucket Bike but it has a respectable capacity for mail.  Few know it by name but everyone will recognise the bike in the picture above, used for decades by the Royal Mail for local deliveries.  It offers several obvious advantages over thing such as trolleys (only move at walking speed), walking alone (slower, lower load capacity) and motorised transport (a whole array of environmental, cost and social problems).  It even offers a further advantage; healthier workers take fewer sick days.  But now the Mailstar is under threat from the management.  Their motivations are unclear; the blanket “health and safety concerns” excuse has been trotted out but anyone who rides knows it must be covering up some other internal political reason.  Perhaps Royal Mail has been offered a deal for cheap vans from an automotive manufacturer and ditching the iconic bikes is part of the deal, perhaps the pension pot is being stretched too thin for the management’s taste by the extended life-spans of the former cycle-posties. 

Most companies would (or should) be considering moving towards a sustainable, bicycle-based alternative to their transport needs where possible.  It strikes me as odd that Royal Mail would move away from this established infrastructure they already have at a time when transport sustainability is increasingly important to us all.  If there is a save the Mailstar campaign, count me in, I think the public would not like to see these icons disappear and by raising awareness (for example by whingeing about it in a blog) maybe we can save them before it is too late.

7 comments:

  1. Doesn't surprise me massively - Royal Mail use planes to shift most stuff from England to north of Carlisle!!

    A couple of years ago they abandoned the Post Office Railway [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway] - given London's horrendous traffic problems you would have thought that would be useful. Or bikes though the city...

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  3. Its probably cheaper just to have people walking.... and if there is any volume a van.

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  4. It would be cheaper to just walk if they didn't already have a fleet of bikes ready to use. With a given load they can cover a much larger area by bike than by foot.

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  5. I contacted RM about it, received a lame reply and then I emailed back... just because... ok... just to get it off my chest... and managed it without insulting their tiny tiny brain for which, in their opinion, a van is more efficient than a bike.. sob!

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  6. It would be good if they gave the parts a way instead of scrapping them - I was at the post office on Stockport Road not that long ago and they have already started removing the wheels from the majority of the bikes... it is a shame :(

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  7. in cities like London the walking trolley makes more sense as rounds are short in length but with lots of stops and lots of post.. the trolleys hold loads more post than the mailstar and are stable... in towns though it is different as the gaps between deliveries and back to the mail office makes cycling a sensible option - just my observations from living in a town and working in a city. Would be nice perhaps to give posties the option to choose though.

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