AGet out, walk around the car, unload the parcel and hand it in: this is a ritual that Swiss Post deliverers perform many times a day. But in the future, hundreds of employees of the group will have to change their habits. For a few days now, postal delivery people have been traveling nationwide in vehicles in which the steering wheel is not on the left as usual, but on the right. One of them is Carina Haselbach. The 27-year-old delivery woman from Bensheim in southern Hesse is the first employee in the region to use the right-hand drive.
Haselbach, who is in charge of Bensheim district number 6462514 in the city center, says that the reason the post office literally switched sides in its cars is primarily for security reasons. “If you get off on the left-hand side, as usual, as a delivery lady you always have to be careful not to be run over.” With the new car, she no longer gets out on the side of the road, but is right on the sidewalk. “This increases my safety at work, especially on busy main roads.” And she also saves a few steps to get to the car.
The new vehicle is an electric car called Streetscooter with a walk-in loading area, which DHL developed together with the University of Aachen specifically for letter and parcel delivery. There are now around 20,000 street scooters on the roads throughout Germany for the post office, and a good one in ten will soon be right-hand drive. Carina Haselbach was specially trained for the journeys because, for example, parking out of a vehicle is more difficult than in a car with the steering wheel on the left. “But you quickly get used to it.”
