Tag:amenity=post_office

+/- amenity=post_office Description A place where letters and parcels may be sent or collected. Used on these elements Useful combination Key:name Used combinations in World Australia/Oceania Europe (list) Asia (list) Central America (list) South America (list) Africa (list) Status Undefined

A post office. A place where letters and parcels may be sent or collected.

Use amenity=post_office on nodes or areas.

Contents 1 Tags to use in combination 2 Related Tags 3 Potential data source 3.1 France 3.2 United Kingdom 3.3 United States

Tags to use in combination

• name=* - if it had a particular name
• operator=* - if a private company operates it.

• atm=yes - could be used if there is a automated teller machine present. However if possible you should try to place a separate amenity=atm node.
• ref=* - could be used if there is a number of the post-agency

Related Tags

• amenity=post_box

Potential data source

France

A list of postal public facilities has been released by the French Government initiative for Open Data. Locations indicated in this file seems to be the result of geocoding, and appear to be of variable quality (from very precise to obviously wrong). This is a very valuable input, but it cannot be imported without checking and comparisons from other sources.

United Kingdom

A FOI request FOIA request - "Address and opening times of Post Office branches" failed to obtain a list of Post Office locations as Royal Mail argued that the information was already available via a search tool on their website. Data obtained from this list has unclear copyright status, though Royal Mail states in their FOI response that "there are no restrictions to access, the number of searches which can be made or to subsequent use of this information".

The list of Post Offices scraped from this tool by Edward Betts contains only postcodes, rather than lat/long values. But Code-Point Open can be used to convert these. Mapper rjw62 has a tool to compare this data with that from OSM, and display discrepencies as markers on a slippymap. See: http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/postboxes/ . While it's unclear if we can legally import the locations (and we probably wouldn't want to anyway as the postcodes lat/longs aren't always that accurate) the tool can certainly be used to indicate places to survey.

United States

In the US. Copyrighted material at USPS White Pages ("Locate a Post Office"). Suggest using this only to provide website link for GNIS data which has been batch uploaded and provide information for association with a particular way; see, for instance, Fort Hamilton Station in Brooklyn, New York. Do not use to create new Post Office locations, nor to pull address data for inclusion in OSM. Copyright status: "Material on this site is the copyrighted property of the United States Postal Service® (Postal Service™)."

Related terms: mail office. post office.