[Talk-GB] UK Quarterly Project: Post Offices

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On 2 May 2018 at 19:08, David Woolley <forums at david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:
> On 02/05/18 18:52, ael wrote:
>>
>> I am confused:-)  How should a Royal mail local delivery office be
>> tagged? It seems that it is not amenity=post_office. I notice that
>> I have used post_depot once some time ago, but that doesn't seem to be
>> in the wiki (or in the presets for josm). Yet I am sure that I got it
>> from somewhere. Not that it seems very natural.
>
> I'm fairly sure this came up a couple of months ago and the answer was
> amenity=post_depot; operator=Royal Mail.  It's not, in principle, different
> from Hermes or TNT.

That's certainly what I'd use. I think there's a good case for tagging
customer-facing shop-like outlets of courier firms as
amenity=post_office since they're places from which you can send
stuff. But for the large warehouse-style sorting/distribution centres
I think something else is needed. amenity=post_depot seems a good
choice to me. It has over 400 uses worldwide, of which over 300 are in
the UK.

The legitimate use of amenity=post_office for non-Post Office Ltd
branches creates a slight issue for my comparison tool. I've got some
heuristics to account for some sets of objects based on name,
operator, and brand tagging. See:
http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/postoffice/osm-unmatched.html#non-pol

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker