[Scan-DC] Univ. of Maryland 9-1-1 Street Addressing

[Bruce Harper]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 1:58 AM, Scott  wrote:

I know from doing service calls around Baltimore, and being a UPS shipping
> guy for a while, that many campuses in town use a single address for their
> campus.


Virginia Tech went through this process two years ago, working with USPS,
the Town of Blacksburg, emergency services, and other groups. There was a
heavy GIS involvement, to determine what coordinates would be used as the
"location" of a building (large buildings without a well-defined "front
door" were a challenge). It wasn't a simple process, since there are
buildings that are "internal" to campus and not on an actual street
(vehicles get there via service road or sidewalk). There was an education
process to convert everyone on campus from using just a room number and
building name as their address, now a street address is included on
business cards, letterhead, email, etc. Facilities reworked signage to
include the street address along with the building name. It wasn't an easy
transition, but it wasn't that big of a deal either. The campus police
dispatchers now send officers, the Virginia Tech Rescue Squad, and the
Blacksburg Fire Department to locations giving the street address of a
building along with a room number.

There was minimal impact on the USPS since Virginia Tech has its own mail
service, which receives mail by the truckload from the postal service, then
sorts and delivers it internally. There is a central package pick-up
location for students living in residence halls to receive mailed packages.
It has made it easier for UPS, FexEx, and the other delivery services,
mainly for those who order things and had to deal with the problem of
entering a room number and building name for an address and having
difficulty getting it accepted. For the drivers, not so much -- the folks
from the Roanoke UPS hub all knew the campus as well as anyone who works
here (probably better than most) and could work out the best delivery
sequence to hit the buildings with a minimum of driving.

Bruce in Blacksburg