Mail Service in L.A. Is Put to the Test

How good is the mail service in Los Angeles?

To find out, The Times undertook an informal test of its own. The question: How long would it take letters to find their way within the basin, to other parts of California and the West, and to Washington, D.C.? The test also included a sample mailing from the Washington area to points in the Los Angeles basin.

Postal Service standards call for most first-class mail deposited in the Los Angeles basin to be delivered the following day within the basin, including the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, Orange County and the city of San Diego.

Los Angeles mail is to be delivered on the second day to all other points in California and to major population areas of the West, including Seattle, Denver, Las Vegas and Phoenix. The rest of the continental United States should get items mailed from Los Angeles on the third day.

In all, reporters posted 650 pieces of mail from randomly selected mailboxes in West Los Angeles, downtown Los Angeles, Long Beach and Washington. The letters were in white, legal-size envelopes, machine-printed for legibility and stamped. Each contained a blank sheet of paper.

The postings were divided in two to minimize the chance that a onetime glitch in postal operations--say, a freeway disaster or mass breakdown of postal vehicles--would overly influence the results. Half were mailed Oct. 31, the rest Nov. 3.

The test showed that within Los Angeles, the system worked well--better, in fact, than its performance in the Postal Service’s own official surveys, conducted throughout the year by the auditing firm of Price, Waterhouse & Co.

In the May-September period, Price Waterhouse found that the Los Angeles postal district met its overnight standard only 80% of the time. But of the 200 Times test pieces sent within Los Angeles, 187 were delivered the next day, for an on-time performance of 94%.

However, the Postal Service’s performance markedly deteriorated as distances widened.

On-time delivery of second-day mail posted from Los Angeles dropped to 89%, with delivery to Seattle a particularly woeful 64%; just 32 out of 50 letters made it on time.

Delivery of letters sent from Los Angeles to the Washington area--widely regarded as having nearly the worst mail service in the country--showed the greatest problems.

Only about 65% of the pieces sent to Washington from Los Angeles (98 out of 150) made it within three days. On the other hand, 97 out of 100 pieces sent to Los Angeles from Washington arrived on schedule.