At long last, the US Postal Service is preparing to add some EVs to its delivery fleet, and is planning to install chargers for these fleet vehicles at some facilities. The Government Accountability Office (a sort of watchdog agency that keeps track of who in the sprawl of government agencies is spending what) has made the sensible suggestion that USPS also make the chargers available for employees to use to charge their personal vehicles.
According to the GAO, USPS has not incorporated the potential for sharing its fleet chargers with employees—or installing additional chargers for employee use—into its facility preparation plans.
The GAO studied the issue, and interviewed various USPS employees and stakeholders. Unsurprisingly, several of these said that employees would benefit from workplace charging. “USPS has taken some initial steps to explore the potential for employees to charge their own vehicles at work,” the GAO concedes. However, “USPS officials said there are complex issues USPS would need to resolve before it could establish a workplace charging program, such as developing policies and potentially negotiating work rules with multiple employee organizations.”
In conclusion, the GAO recommended that the Postmaster General “ensure appropriate USPS leaders incorporate the potential for workplace charging into planning efforts to deploy fleet-charging infrastructure,” and says that “USPS partially agreed,” whatever that means.
On the other hand, the GAO found that “hosting chargers for the general public would pose significant challenges and provide relatively few benefits to USPS.” USPS officials and stakeholders whom GAO interviewed said hosting public chargers could be at odds with USPS’s goal of moving customers in and out of a facility quickly, and pointed out that USPS is generally prohibited from offering non-postal services.
Source: GAO