In the Gard, La Poste cars equipped with cameras to track down potholes

They crisscross the territory six days a week. The yellow cars of the postal workers are part of the landscape in the cities as in the villages. An omnipresence that has led a sector of the La Poste group to develop a new service for local authorities: diagnosis of the state of the road network. That day, Eve Dussaud, letter carrier in Aigues-Mortes (Gard) made her usual rounds, with a camera on the roof of her car: “It’s a good thing to be able to participate in the improvement of the municipality, because we use these roads and we are very happy that they are in good condition as well.“.

Diversification needed

The town hall of Aigues-Mortes called on this service to draw up an inventory of its roads and thus plan the necessary work and budget. The images are analyzed by the service provider, who thus delivers a turnkey precise diagnosis and recommendations: “The images are sent to video-coders, humans, who behind their computer will analyze all the images to identify road damage, but also do geo-referencing of street furniture if necessary“, explains Hugo Villet, business engineer at Geoptis.

For the La Poste group, this new service is part of the strategy of the necessary diversification of its activities, to cope with the constant decline for twenty years in mail traffic. “Our mail activity has fallen sharply for many years, so today we are looking for new activities for our agents, to sustain the jobs of our postmen.“, specifies Philippe Zancki, Rhône Camargue operations manager at La Poste. In 2002, eighteen billion letters were sent by the Post Office; in 2022, postmen only delivered seven billion.