There are many issues on this campus that are debated year after year and never seem to come to a close. The need for campus to have a central receiving department, however, does not seem to have many detractors, and although it comes up at least annually, the walkways on campus seem to be filled by more vehicles with each passing day. Not only will establishing central receiving and banning deliveries directly to every building help to maintain the campus—which has seen many landscaping projects in recent years—but it is also the only way to ensure an accident does not happen on our campus walkways.
If you walk through the core campus during the day, you will inevitably pass by many vehicles—ranging from delivery companies such as UPS and FedEx to stores such as Staples delivering supplies. They are often traveling directly to the academic building which houses the customer, rather than bringing them to a central receiving department as is done with all U.S. Postal Service mail sent to RPI’s mailing address. This means that the vehicles are driving all over campus on a daily basis and making several stops using the pedestrian walkways.
With central receiving, on the other hand, all deliveries could go to one building, accessible from a parking lot or road. Then, similar to how mail gets distributed, deliveries would be made by central receiving to the departments that ordered things at scheduled times during the day. The amount of vehicles traveling on the pedestrian walkways would be greatly reduced and as a result, the likelihood of anyone getting hurt drastically reduced. In addition, much has been spent in recent years to landscape the campus in order to improve its atmosphere. Having fewer vehicles travel through campus will go a long way in ensuring upkeep costs remain as low as possible.
Since this issue does come up repeatedly, we hope to see something actually come to fruition this year. Perhaps it will take some time to get central receiving fully up and running, but the establishment of a better process than the status quo is long overdue.
