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Stampeding Calgary

Hate to be the mailman that sorts the mail for these addresses.
 
Oh, I'm sure the closest mailmen ever get is something like this but 100 times bigger:
04003013.jpg
 
Actually the mailman first sorts the mail into bundles for every address on his route. This is done at the postal depot and can take a couple of hours. In the new subdivisions where they have this kind of box I'd imagine more than half the shift would be allocated to this sorting.

I used to be a mailman and I know it would be a very frustrating exercise to sort mail for addresses that are so similar. Mind you, if you do a route long enough you do start to memorize the names of the people living at each address.
 
"Clearly, a madman is central to the naming process."

Autism.
 
Hmm...I always assumed one guy did the sorting and another went out and delivered it. edit - so if two guys have the same workload and one guy finishes 25% faster, he gets to go home earlier?

It might be easier for everyone involved if all "Sierra Grove" precinct mail got dropped off in one big pile at the edge of the highway, letting residents fight badgers and each other for their mail, but then there'd still be "Sienna Grove" mail mixed in when it should have been dropped off in the NW quadrant of the city.
 
Hmm...I always assumed one guy did the sorting and another went out and delivered it. edit - so if two guys have the same workload and one guy finishes 25% faster, he gets to go home earlier?
Click to expand...

I delivered for Canada Post during the winter of 1990 or 1991. Unless things have changed only one guy did both. Each carrier would have a small sortation wall with slots for each and every stop on his route. Mail for his route (and only his route) would be awaiting at his desk when he came in (usually at around 6AM). This mail would be unsorted. He would sort the mail into the correct slots, then bundle according to the sequence the mail was to be delivered. The sorted and bundled mail would then be brought to the loading dock where trucks would take the mail to the green postal boxes you see around the city. The mailman would then go to the first green box, take his mail and start delivering.

And yes someone working faster would get to go home earlier. In my days there were some guys that could do 8 hours in 5 (they got paid for 8) . That was mainly due to the fact they were fast, knew their routes inside out or had an easy route. That was changing though. Canada Post was in the process of measuring every single route by length and by volume to ensure that everyone had the same amount of work to do.

Allso, you had to deliver everything that was at your desk in the morning. You couldn't hold anything back so you had to deliver it all even if the volume was double that of the previous day.

Of course you could do what some fellow in Montreal did a few years back when he decided to take Friday's off every week. The authorities found a storage room of mail that he had failed to deliver for a few years. He was charged for that one.
 
^ From the 1991 Guinness Book of World Records:

"For failing to deliver 42,768 letters, a sentence of 384,912 years, or nine years per letter, was demanded at the prosecution of Gabriel March Grandos, 22, at Palma de Mallorca, Spain on Mar. 11, 1972."
 
9 years seems harsh... we hardly give that to people who rape children here in Canada.
 
Is there anyone alive who still writes, or receives, letters?
 
"Is there anyone alive who still writes, or receives, letters?"

Yes, and yes.
 
Toronto's sprawl is, from my experience, probably the most benign in North America. We have fairly high densities, rudimentary transit service and even an interregional bus network (although this is unreliable for serious inter-city traveling). You want to see sprawl? Look at the US south or parts of Atlantic Canada for the worst offenders. Of course, Toronto's sprawl - because it's so dense - is particularly visible and that's why it gets so wrongly vilified. Meanwhile, Atlanta's footprint is about the size of Algonquin park but hidden under a dense canopy of trees.

Sprawl in North America is so out of hand that the LA basin can be legitimately considered one of the densest metros on the continent. Toronto would probably fall into that category, too.
 
the sprawl here is horrific, the old city is well laid out, but the newer areas are just a mess, the city really has no plan for controlled growth, they are just letting all these projects go through, because they need the housing. I think a green-belt like what toronto did is necessary.
 
Is sprawl here really that benign? The GTA urban foot print is horrendous, urban area land is very poorly utilized, we have lots of isolated skyscraper blocks but almost nothing in the way of mid-rise districts. Then again while I am well travelled I have little personal experience visiting the suburban tracts of other North American regions.
 
the problem is that there density in the core, but out side it and the density really peters out I live on 14 Av SW which is only like 5 blocks out of the true downtown and there is like a lot of low rise buildings where there should be mid-rise, the city is more content to sprawl out and annex parts of MD of Rocky Veiw and spread towards Ardrie, the city has a population of 1 million and the urban footprint of a city of 7 million. And it really shows. look at a satellite image of the city and you will see what I mean.
 
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