The University plans to create a centralized package system for graduate students living on campus featuring lockers near residences open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Starting in the fall of 2025, the Land, Buildings & Real Estate (LBRE) Mail & Packages Service (MPS) will now manage graduate students’ packages.
The volume of packages delivered to residences have increased in recent years, reaching over half a million packages per year. This growth has driven concerns about package theft, emissions for delivery trucks and campus safety. The new process aims to reduce the number of delivery trucks by 50 to 70 delivery trucks per day. Currently, about 90 to 100 delivery vehicles come to the two package centers each day, not including the rest of the delivery vehicles going to student residences directly.
The new changes are part of Stanford’s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and improvements to campus safety, Michele Rasmussen, the vice provost for student affairs, Shirley Everett, the senior associate vice provost for Residential and Dining Enterprises and Jack Cleary, the associate vice president for Land, Buildings and Real Estate wrote in a Thursday email to graduate students.
Under this system, all packages will be sent to a receiving warehouse in Newark, Calif. for processing, after which “an electric truck fleet” will deliver them to lockers across campus, the email added. Graduate students will be able to track the packages through MPS’s web portal and see when they can pick them up near their residence.
In 2022, former Provost Persis Drell asked LBRE to develop a new process that will address delivery issues on campus. MPS solicited information from community members in different units and schools. The new process also follows efforts by MPS to solicit information from seven peer institutions, leading to the decision that a centralized distribution system would best serve students.
The new delivery system will charge graduate students $40 for the fall, winter and spring quarters and $30 for the summer quarter as part of their University bill, similar to the mail fee that undergraduate students pay as part of their tuition.
Undergraduate students will not be affected by the change unless they are living in graduate housing, according to Ramussen in a written statement to The Daily. There will also not be changes to current MPS services or staffing. Five additional staff members will be added to manage the process.
“With this change, we look forward to a collective decrease in campus truck traffic, reduced trash and emissions, and increased community safety,” Rasmussen, Everett and Cleary wrote in the email.
This article was updated to reflect the accurate number of delivery trucks on campus each day.