Postal Driver Reaches One Million Accident-Free Miles

For thirty years, Richard Chiselko of the U.S. Post Office (USPS) completed his route without ever having an accident. For that feat, Chiselko, who lives in the Somerset section of Franklin, NJ recently was recognized with the National Safety Council’s prestigious Million Mile Award for thirty years of accident-free driving.

The Million Mile award is given to professional drivers who have operated a motor vehicle on the job for more than one million miles without a preventable accident. Reaching the milestone requires thirty years of service and "a safe attitude," according to the USPS.

The USPS’s nationwide network of facilities is linked by nearly 214,000 vehicles and is the world’s largest civilian fleet. Its 297,000 letter carriers and truck drivers log more than 1.2 billion miles annually when delivering to America’s 151.5 million addresses. To achieve Chiselko’s personal thirty-year feat, a person would have to travel around the earth 40.1 times to cover one million miles.

Prior to North Brunswick, Chiselko served twenty years on a New Brunswick "college-area" route, he said.

Chiselko joined the USPS after seven years in the U.S. Army and two years serving with the Veteran’s Administration. "I joined the Army at age seventeen, after I got kicked out of high school," said Chiselko, who originally is from Somerville. "Then I was an MP for two years. I was in Alaska and actually took the test there and got hired there. But, by that time, I had moved back to New Jersey."

Chiselko admitted that his military background provided him with excellent training for driving professionally as a letter carrier. "I was in Germany when I learned to drive at seventeen in the military," he said. "Then in Alaska, as an MP, we were constantly given driver’s training."

According to the USPS, Chiselko has joined a group of 7,065 postal employees who have reached the milestone since 2005. "I told them this was the only award I really wanted because I felt this was the hardest one to get," he said. "When I hit the twenty-five-year mark, I was thinking ‘Wow! I went this long,’ I really wanted to do this."

The laws are key to Chiselko, who hopes to retire by the end of the year. "I advise people to know the laws and study them," Chiselko said. "I see many people who are lazy when it comes to things like turn signals. You have got to let people know what you plan on doing. Not too many people do that nowadays."

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