The police showed up at our house Friday. I was not home, so mom talked to him. Very nice officer. He was there because someone had reported our mailbox as a ‘road hazard’. The box has been hit at least twice recently. The 2nd hit has affected the way the door works so I will have to take the box off & see what I can do.
What the officer found:
Box is installed per post office regulations which means 6 to 8” off the edge of the pavement. Mail carrier approved the installed location.
Extra fluorescent tape has been added to the box to make it more/VERY visible.
Our box is a ‘swing’ box - if hit, it swings out of the way. This was developed for rural roads where mailboxes tend to get wiped out by snow plows. The officer had never seen a swing box before & really liked it.
Officer’s conclusions:
Our box is NOT a road hazard. He told mom if it gets hit again to call the police & file a damage report that would help with an insurance claim (we are not filing claims for an $80 mailbox). He also loved the views at our house. I think mom has a new friend!:-)
Back to the mailbox .... there are a lot of very large pickups with big mirrors & big tires so their lights are high enough that if the driver cannot keep his truck on the pavement, the mailbox gets hit. The ‘complainer’ is lucky we have a swing box because if it were on a regular post, damage to their vehicle would be much more severe. The mailbox is also extra heavy-duty. The box when we bought the house had been hit & the door barely worked & the wooden post was badly cracked. I got permission from the PO to move the box to our side of the road so mom didn’t have to walk across the road - that’s when we got the new box & swing post.
Of course, no one who has hit our box has had the common courtesy to let us know so I have zero empathy for their vehicle damage. Based on some of the debris I’ve picked up, it’s probably a couple hundred dollars per hit.
The fact that someone complained means the police probably know who it was that struck your mailbox. Hopefully not a near neighbor. They Probably use a truck that pulls a trailer for a horse or construction equipment and they have oversized outrigger rear view mirrors. (Which is prudent up to a point...) If you take another hit save the debris for the police report and perhaps they can return the parts and investigate the owner of the truck for reckless driving instead of investigating you for your stationary compliant PO Box!
I knew the officer wouldn’t find anything wrong with your mailbox!
This used to happen @ my Dad’s fairly regularly — he was on a very busy local highway. PITA. The ground there is pretty soft much of the year, so, usually there’d be tracks to confirm the vehicle was about 2 feet off the road. Oh, of course there were plenty of tracks in other places along that ditch, from time to time! I chalk most of it up to drunks - which is a bit, ah, “sobering”.
Our mailbox is on a narrower road on the west side of our property, but it’s only about 80 feet from a stop sign at the corner of our property. So, most people are slowing down*, and we’ve not had much problem with the mailbox getting hit, despite the narrower road (than at Dad’s old place.) Plus, the post (painted very bright white) sets into an old 10 gallon milk jug filled with concrete that just sits there. The one time it did get hit, it just fell over, and I set it back up the next day. There’s a light brace sort of to the side and rear - a nail pulled out partially, so I re-nailed it with a new nail. No biggie.
*Except when the stop sign gets knocked down. The corner on our side is ~ 75 deg., and with the narrow road, long vehicles in particular hit that stop sign, trying to “make” the corner, quite often, despite it being “planted several feet off the road. A USGS marker even further off the road but more “in the corner” gets whacked even more often.
Either some sort of swing arm or overhead stop sign is really needed. It’d save the County money in the long run. Over the last 30 years there have been several considerable collisions at that corner, at least one partially due to the stop sign being bent backwards. By good fortune nobody has been seriously injured or killed. In one case a vehicle literally went airborne for about 50 ft. over part of our front yard. In a somewhat similar accident a little under a mile away, the “flight” ended up with the vehicle slamming roof & windshield first into an embankment and killing the driver. :-(
The road in front of our place is busier than the one to the west, and goes into a moderate curve about 250 ft. east of our east driveway. There are tire tracks in that ditch even more regularly, and several times arrow “curve” signs have been knocked down. One is down right now, just past our property, in fact. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve found damaged mirror assemblies or other auto parts while clearing that ditch of trash, branches, etc. One driver clipped a big tree a few feet off the far side of the ditch: From the “scrape” damage to the tree and pieces from the vehicle, I’m guessing his damages were likely in the “a few thousand $$ range”, but, the tracks showed he never stopped, kept plowing on, and finally got out of the ditch about 100 ft. further on. It was muddy and the ruts (had to be a 4WD “dually”) were really impressive.
A nice post. I remember you talking about the box and putting it in. You did everything right. Hugs!