On November 17, the KAIST Undergraduate Association (UA) announced that motorcycle food delivery to campus will continue to be banned.
In May, the UA released a survey to collect students’ opinions regarding the need to improve delivery convenience by allowing delivery motorcycles to enter campus grounds. Since most students could not get food delivered to their dormitories, the overall responses were extremely positive, with 90.3% of respondents among 1,891 respondents calling for a lift on the delivery motorcycle ban.
On July 17, the UA received approval from the KAIST Undergraduate and Graduate Dormitory Council and the Graduate Student Association to continue with their efforts to allow delivery motorcycles to enter the school. The UA proposed a policy that would allow delivery motorcycles to deliver to certain designated areas on campus using specific roads, which would be continuously monitored by the Campus Police to ensure safety. On September 16, the UA discussed their suggestions with the school administration, but they were sternly rejected.
The school rejected the UA’s policy change suggestion for three main reasons. The first reason was related to KAIST’s campus size. One of the UA’s arguments was that no other science institutes or universities ban motorcycle delivery. However, school officials pointed out that other science institutes like POSTECH have a much smaller campus and thus less room for accidents, while larger universities realistically cannot prohibit all outsider motorcycles from entering their campuses. Moreover, the officials also claimed that they simply do not have enough human resources to monitor all delivery motorcycles and ensure safety.
The second reason was that the suggested policy does not fully address the safety concerns. They claimed that allowing motorcycles to enter would inevitably increase the overall number of motorcycles on campus, increasing risk of accidents. Even with policies like the one suggested by the UA, the school officials insisted that it is impossible to fundamentally resolve the danger posed by motorcycles, and thus must be banned for safety.
Lastly, even with all the safety measures imposed, if an accident were to happen, the school must take moral responsibility, which is far too heavy a burden for the officials.
Although the UA requested for officials to continue to consider the students’ voice in unbanning motorcycle delivery, a policy change is not likely to happen anytime soon. However, the UA will continue to revise their proposals to allow for periodic deliveries from the West Gate to dormitories.