RICHMOND, Va. — The U.S. Postal Service responded Friday to a recent report ranking Richmond’s mail delivery times as the third-worst in the country.

Jaclyn Barton, a VCU graduate student studying multimedia journalism, compiled the data she obtained from the USPS website for the Capital News Service.

Last spring, less than 84% of the region’s first-class mail was delivered on time, according to the figures. Only two service areas in the U.S. had a worse on-time delivery rate.

“The data speaks for itself,” Barton said. “I was able to put numbers to those voices.”

The Richmond area’s worst quarter in recent years was October through December of 2018, when less than 66% of the mail that was supposed to be delivered in three to five days arrived on time.

That was a difficult quarter throughout the country for the Postal Service: The nationwide on-time delivery rate for that period was just over 72%.

Barton found the Postal Service’s target is to deliver 96.5% of two-day mail and 95.3% of three-to five-day mail to arrive on time. The service set those targets in 2014, but has never met them. Read more at WTVR