Talk:Key:collection times

Oddball case

PH41 118 states (on the box) that collections are "15 minutes before ferry departs".

Used together with opening_hours

I found some amenity=post_box which have collection_times=* and opening_hours=*. opening_hours=* are probably used to describe the accessibility of the post box or amenity=post_box is wrong (amenity=post_office would be better in those cases).

overpass turbo

Most post boxes (which are tagged correct) use opening_hours=24/7 so there are accessible all the time. Not sure if this is necessary because almost all post box are accessible 24/7 after my knowledge. 24/7 is the default, if other opening_hours=* apply for one post box, then they can be specified. What do you think?--Ypid (talk) 16:57, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps post boxes that are within a post office, mall etc. --Westnordost (talk) 22:44, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

Starting at some hour

I found a post box by the operator Pin AG in Berlin, Germany. There is written "Montag bis Freitag ab 18:00 Uhr" which means "starting at 18 o'clock". How can I specify this?

The answer to this question can be found in the first paragraph of Key:collection_times where the following is stated: "The syntax is the same as for opening hours, including the hyphen because there are post boxes which are emptied several (undefined) times or one (undefined) time in a certain time frame.". I would write it like this collection times=Mo-Fr 18:00-22:00 open "Specified as collection occurs once after 18:00. But not after 22:00 (From own experience)". Please use the evaluation tool to check if your value is correct.--Ypid (talk) 16:39, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Tagging no fixed collection times

How to tag if there is no info on a postbox when the mail is collected? Most postboxes will have this info (source), even in less organized countries, so to say, but it may still occur that a postbox does not always have this info posted. Examples:

Albania, Argentia, Columbia, Greece, Kosovo Brasil

Especially "private" postboxes operated by i.e. hotels who empty them at irregular intervals and bring them to the post office by themselves, a practice sometimes found in touristy areas of certain countries will have no times posted.

It should be possible to tag the absence of official collection times somehow to indicate that someone surveyed the postbox for collection times, but did not find any info on the box. This is important so that the next surveyor will not have to look for it again, thinking this info is missing. For opening hours, it is possible to tag something like opening_hours="by appointment", but this is not really applicable here.

How about no_collection_times (analogous to no_name)? The other option would be of course a free text like note:collection_times=no times visible on the box but I think no collection times might be found often enough to warrant a tagging that is programmatically evaluatable. Also, I am not sure if for note:collection_times=something to be "correct", the key collection_times should be defined.

Any opinions?

--Westnordost (talk) 23:08, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

the Opening hours syntax allows free text inside "quotes". all implementations are aware of this, so no need for using other tags.--Zuse (talk) 15:18, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

It is allowed syntactically, but that doesn't mean that any free text can be entered there. The documentation for the "comment" reads Comments can be used to give the user additional information or limitations. It can also be used when the opening hours can not be reliable determined by software because they depend on some subjective information e.g. weather.. Would a usage like collection_times="no times visible on the box" be applicable to the cited definition? --Westnordost (talk) 12:23, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Actually, thinking more about this, I'd say that the free text comment field is not eligible for that information because since it is an information that is targeted at the user, I read in the wiki that it should be in the language of where the postbox is. So, not always in English. It's good for when the collection times can only be expressed through a textual description, i.e. "after postmaster's lunch", "when it is full", "10 mins before the ferry leaves" etc.. All these values are usually not to be found posted on the box itself but must be found out. Just putting "nothing is posted" on there just tells that the surveyor did not find anything on the box, that does not mean that mean that there isn't any regularity that could be described in textual form.

So, I will use note:collection_times=no times specified on the box for StreetComplete, it's already used a few times according to taginfo. --Westnordost (talk) 10:36, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

I think it would be better if there was a more computer-readable tag for this, which perhaps could be extended to include other similar tags where you'd expect to find the answer by a survey but the information might be missing. For postboxes, the box number (ref=* tag) also comes to mind. What about something like collection_times:visible=no or collection_times:signed=no ? (*:visible was my first though, but then I found 3 instances of ref:signed=no on UK post boxes. There are also 100+ uses of ref:signed=no on other objects in the UK.) -- Rjw62 (talk) 12:42, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

See also related https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/opening_hours:sign%3Dno Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 14:16, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

So, collection_times:signed=no, analogous to the proposed feature linked by Mateusz then, Rjw62? --Westnordost (talk) 18:44, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Collection frequency

We see

Once a week
A recycling container collected on a Monday (not at a set time):

amenity=recycling
collection_times=Mo

Well, how about when

• We know they come once a week
• But we don't know which day
• And we don't intend to hang around the dumpster all week to find out
• Plus we are a nerd mapper and don't go ringing doorbells asking (for trouble!)
• And no, there are no labels on the dumpster. ("You should be glad anyone comes and dumps it at all.")

So here we have a valuable piece of information, perhaps best expressed as

collection_times=weekly

or perhaps a new

collection_frequency=weekly

Therefore please somebody document a standard of how to deal with this, rather than just "defer tagging until you know the exact day"... indeed there might not be an exact day in the first place. E.g., the collector has a busy route and tries to get to each location within a week. All we know is if last pickup was already about a week ago, then next pickup should be soon. Jidanni (talk) 12:39, 10 August 2023 (UTC)