U.S. Postal Service Rolls Out New App To Protect Mail Carriers From Dogs

With the rise of Amazon Prime and eCommerce, more packages are being delivered to customers’ homes than ever before. It’s now possible to order everything online for in-home delivery from groceries to pet food to toilet paper, and consumers can usually get those items delivered to their doorstep overnight or in a manner of hours.

The U.S. Postal Service delivered 4.5 billion packages in 2015, a big jump from the 3.3 billion in packages it delivered to customers in 2011, and now accounts for about 40 percent of all of Amazon’s deliveries, according to the analyst firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

But with this uptick in parcel deliveries comes an unintended consequence — more and more mailmen are getting bitten by dogs.

As Amazon and other eCommerce companies better try to shift their delivery schedule around nights and weekends (when customers are more likely to be home and can sign for or accept delivery of packages), it is much more likely that mail carriers will also come in contact with their dogs.

And, no matter how friendly a dog might be, no animal likes its territory or home encroached on by a stranger or outsider.

In 2015, 6,549 postal workers were attacked by dogs, an increase of 14 percent from the previous year, according to a Bloomberg report.

UPS said it had 900 dog bites involving delivery drivers last year, which involved less than 1 percent of its 100,000 delivery drivers in the field, while FedEx declined to comment on the issue. Combined, UPS and FedEx handle about 30–40 percent of all Amazon deliveries, down from a peak of 70 percent in 2012.

“Dogs view mailmen as trespassers invading their space,” Michael Micali, a veteran mailman who has walked the same Flemington, New Jersey mail route for 25 years, told Bloomberg. “Let’s face it: A dog doesn’t have much to do all day if the house is empty but to sleep and wait for the mailman who comes around the same time each day.”

Micali himself was once bitten by a dog about 20 years ago along his route, when an owner couldn’t restrain their Airedale terrier; the bite required stitches in Micali’s hand to heal.

Dog bite claims alone rose 16 percent in 2015 to $37,214, according to the Insurance Information Institute, which cited “the surge in U.S. post office worker attacks, many of which take place at the customer’s door” as one of the primary driving factors of the increase.

In order to combat the rising scourge of dog bites along its carriers’ routes, the U.S. Postal Service launched the Trip Hazards app on all handheld devices that mailmen use to scan packages along their routes. Rolled out on May 13 to coincide with National Dog Bite Prevention Week, the app allows carriers to log hazards they may encounter along their route — like damaged or unsafe steps or porches, ice, downed trees or wires, construction sites and, of course, dogs that may be prone to bite.

Scott Hooper, the U.S. Postal Service’s delivery strategy and planning manager, said that the app has already proven quite popular with postal workers, using the app to enter more than 160,000 notifications of potential hazards or dangers along their routes into the database in less than three months. Not all the entries concern vicious or dangerous dogs, although Hooper did note that some carriers have been using the app to note all dogs along their routes, regardless of any history of viciousness.

“We’re looking for places where carriers have a danger,” Hooper said. “Some places have wild turkeys that go after carriers, so those are in there.”

With the Trip Hazards app, a postal worker’s device lights up as they begin to approach a noted hazard, then begins dinging and issuing robotic voice warning commands as the carrier gets closer to the hazard, making even the newest or most unfamiliar mail carrier aware of a potential danger in their path.