[Talk-GB] Royal Mail & Parcelforce delivery offices

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On 15 January 2014 16:03, John Aldridge <jpsa at jjdash.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> On the one hand, there is still a fairly clear common understanding (in this
> country, at least) of what a "Post Office" is, and to use the tag
> amenity=post_office for anything else would perhaps seem a little perverse.

Indeed. Though I think one can separate the idea of a post office like
shop/office from a Post Office Ltd. run enterprise. There are
presumably DHL and UPS run offices that would appear quite post office
like in character (Wrapping materials/boxes available to buy,
weighing/costing services, label printing, etc.) even if they don't
provide the full range of extra non-postal services that Post Office
Ltd. would often do.

But I don't think the presence of a small counter at the side of a
larger deliver / sorting / distribution centre turns the whole
facility (or even just the counter) into a "post office" just because
you can collect and/or post mail there. You can post mail in a post
box, so that technically fulfils the criteria of "A place where
letters and parcels may be sent or collected." But we wouldn't tag
post boxes as post offices, because they're not.

> If I believed there was a snowflake in hell's chance of getting
> amenity=post_depot objects displayed on the default map, I'd be more
> sympathetic, but as it is I think I'd prefer something like...

If everyone followed that reasoning, there would never be any new tags
created! Besides, deliberately tagging known-not-to-be-a-post-office
objects as post offices is incorrectly tagging for the renderer. If we
could agree on some other tagging scheme and show that it's in use,
there's no reason why a patch wouldn't be accepted by one or more
renderers to make use of that tag.

I would strongly advocate using something other than
amenity=post_office for sorting/distribution/delivery offices which
blatently are not post offices. Presumably some of them won't even
allow public access anyway, and I think it would be even more perverse
to tag one sorting office a post office because it has a public
counter, and another as something different because it does not. I
think amenity=post_depot is a reasonable generic tag for such
complexes. Maybe there could be some additional tags to describe what
public services are available there, e.g. public_mail_collection=yes,
public_mail_deposit=yes. (Most of the counters like this I've seen in
Royal Mail sorting/delivery facilities are, as far as I can tell, for
collection of mail only. I guess they'd probably take something from
you to post if they were in a good mood, but I don't think that's what
they're there for.)

Regular Post Offices run/franchised by Post Office Ltd obviously would
continue to be tagged as amenity=post_office. The remaining question
would then be what to do about any post-office-like outlets run by
other private delivery companies. I'd be inclined to tag them
amenity=post_office too as long as they are sufficiently
post-office-like in character, along with a suitable operator tag. If
there's something that you could call a post office on the side of a
larger distribution facility, one could tag the facility as a whole
with amenity=post_depot, and the office at the side with
amenity=post_office. (This would be similar to adding an
amenity=post_office node inside a building polygon for a WHSmith store
for example.)

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker