<div dir="ltr"><p>It's now May and the project is a month old and with two months to go, it's time for an update.</p><p>Robert Whittaker has an <a href="http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/postboxes/">excellent site</a>
monitoring OSM data on postboxes in the UK. Here you can see progress
(even a league table of who's contributing). From the history graph you
can see there's been an increase in activity since the project got
going. Perhaps Robert might provide some data analysis about the effect
of the project.<br></p><p>Enter a postcode and you can find all the
missing and incorrect postboxes nearby. I was amazed at just how many
were missing in the areas I map regularly: a great incentive to revisit
all kinds of places. In doing so I discovered one of those rarities: an
EVIIIR royal cypher(OSM node 448635608).</p><p>(For non-UK readers King
Edward VIII was only on the throne for about 11 months in 1936 before
abdicating so there are only about 130 postboxes bearing the royal
cypher EVIIIR, these being the ones installed during those 11 months)<br></p><p>How
many of these are actually recorded in OSM? It would make a great
treasure hunt for the rest of the project. From web research I think
there are only 2 in Birmingham so my job's done.<br></p><p>I've
been unable to track down some of the indoor postboxes - two in
particular are indicated in Sainsbury's supermarkets near me, but
neither exists. This led me to wonder whether Sainsbury's had some kind
of agreement with Royal Mail which didn't work out so they were removed.
But you can't build a hypothesis on two pieces of data! Does anyone
have any knowledge of this? Or replicate my findings?</p><p>In the West
Midlands we've had some fun trying to locate the Coventry ParcelForce
depot which is NOT where Google thinks it is. It moved over two years
ago and <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/52.4583/-1.5259">is now mapped in OSM</a> . Thanks must go to our local sleuth: spiffymapper.</p><p><a href="http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_Kingdom/Parcel_Lockers">Parcel Lockers</a>
are poorly mapped - only 8 existed in OSM for the UK at the start of
the project. Now there are 11 . It turns out that one of the operators,
ByBox, has its national distribution centre in Coventry so time for
spiffymapper to get his sleuthing shoes on again!</p><p>Any other stories on what folk have been up to on this project are welcome.</p></div>