I have been spending a lot of time looking at streetside imagery of townhalls around the United States. It’s extremely common for there to be a secured drop box for utility payments. Is there a good way to tag these? I am hoping there’s a tag I missed or some delightful British-ism to be used.
ex:
Perhaps amenity=depository? I’m not sure if there’s a nice existing way to specify what is deposited though, apart from tagging the operator=* and such.
I’m surprised this question hasn’t come up sooner for bank night deposit boxes (there is some usage of depository={yes,no} on banks but only in San Francisco)!
It does seem like there should be something already existing, and I’m following this with interest because I do know my town hall has one embedded into the building (which I sometimes use to pay my property tax), and a neighboring town hall (which I actually the town I pay my water bill to) has one just outside their building, and it seems like these might be worthwhile to map. But it also seems like someone in the past likely already had this thought.
It seems really similar to other drop-a-thing-into-a-box objects that already exist, but have their own separate main tags, like library return boxes, mailboxes for outgoing mail, and mailboxes for incoming mail. I think payment terminal implies something electronic, rather than something that’s just “a box” for inserting cash or checks.
If there really isn’t something existing, then I could see maybe making a new amenity= value for it, though I don’t know if there would be enough demand for it to catch on.
I think the closest I found is that incoming mail amenity=letter_box, since really (at least in my experience) it’s basically just a way for the general public to send an envelope when they’re just going by anyway, rather than needing to pay postage to actually mail it. I don’t know if there’s some additional tag that should be added to indicate that it’s for the public to insert envelopes rather than only the postal service. I don’t think access=public fits, but maybe something else along those lines?
Just some brainstorming, but again I’m thinking that other people would have dealt with this already at some point.
amenity=letter_box (maybe with letter_box=utility_payment or similar?) is a nice suggestion and I think closest with the current set of tags. I’m also totally fine making a 
new tag if we’re truly off on our own.
For now, I will add them as amenity=utility_payment_box so they’re easy to find and bulk reconcile once this process as revealed a winner.
Maybe this is because the thing you’re thinking of is different than the thing I’m thinking of, but I feel like the word “utility” is constraining it more than necessary. While I might use it for my water bill, the one I use most at my town hall I might use to pay my property tax bill, submit my annual census, and/or drop off my absentee election ballot. I think others might use it to drop off architectural drawings for the planning board. It really is more of a mailbox, just one for the public to drop things off rather than one used by the postal service. I’ll try to take a picture next time I go by; if I remember right they have a whole list of things posted of what it might be used for.
There was a similar discussion on OSM US Slack about the drop boxes used for self-registration and fee payment at unattended camp sites and day-use areas.
It feels like these could fit in the same tagging scheme.
Then it’s not only “utility”, but also “payment” being unnecessary. Is it =letter_box or =post_box though? To the public, you drop the item in, not retrieve something from it. It should be further distributed by the internal mail system, not opened by someone at the end department directly. =letter_box could fit university pigeonhole boxes more.
However, eg access=customers doesn’t make enough distinction. A =post_box + access=customers could be inside a =theme_park for sending post cards to the public mail system. Besides, a =letter_box is quite access=private by definition.
I think you might have convinced me that these (or at least some of them) are really just amenity=post_box, which as the wiki says are for items “collected and delivered by the operator”. So just like a post_box can be operator=United States Postal Service or operator=FedEx, for sending envelopes through those respective organizations, it could be operator=Town of Somewhereville for a box that was specifically for sending “mail” to that Town’s offices.
I think of a post_box as a single point of drop that can go to many locations. These, on the other hand, are like book drop offs for libraries. You’ve effectively delivered it to exactly where it needs to go. The operator isn’t taking it to the destination, it IS the destination. Book drops having their own specific tag also makes it easier to find exactly those class of things across a geographic area. Having to work out semi-unique operator tags seems like a nightmare for data consumers.
If I wanted to run a QA query and make a map of all townhalls that don’t have a payment drop box nearby, its’ much easier for consumers if the sub key doesn’t explicitly need them to know all municipality names.
Here’s the approved proposal for amenity=library_dropoff that I think is helpful for the way I think about it. I am sure we could come up with a collection of tags and sub tags that make an amenity=post_box read as exactly this class of thing… but there’s also no harm imo in making a new “top level” amenity.
You’re certainly not wrong, and I’m not really disagreeing with making a new tag if nothing existing fits. (Though I would have expected that this wasn’t the first time somebody considered mapping these.) I think there might be a wide range of “drop off for a location” things, and I may be expanding this too broadly. The dropoff in the wall of my local town hall that I was talking about I think might be more of that post_box that goes to many locations, in that while they might all be things for the town government, it’s really to be further distributed to locations within the town hall. So if I was to deliver in person, I might need to go to the collector’s office, or town clerk’s office or planning board office or whatever, but I can drop off “mail” for any of those offices in this one spot, just like I’d mailed it to the town hall’s address but without needing to pay postage, while still being able to submit things after hours.
But I think that this was originally just talking about single-purpose boxes, that are just for submitting payments. I think there are probably more of those, and for things other than utility bills at town halls, too. Things like on-your-honor drop boxes for roadside stands, or parking, or maybe rent? (A couple decades ago when I had an apartment, I would head over to my landlord’s office and stick a check in the box on their door; I don’t know if that’s common at all.)
I’m really just brainstorming still, I don’t know as anything that’s been discussed is an obvious “correct” approach.
I’ve had a similar tagging conundrum with regards to so-called service boxes where merchants can drop off cash for a third party to collect and deposit into the mechant’s bank account. I settled on amenity=cash_deposit for lack of a better alternative, but it seems to me it could be described using the same top level tag as the drop off boxes in townhalls and whatnot, with subtags differentiating the possible goods to drop off.
I don’t know how much this is actually helping us figure out the best way to tag there, as I think there’s a lot of variation and types of these drop-off boxes that exist, but I said that I’d take some pictures of ones near me when I got a chance so there they are.
First, in the Town of Southbridge, there’s a sign on the corner of Town Hall directing people to where the box is at the side of the building, calling it a “Tax Payment Box”:
The actual box has changed since I last remember using it a few years ago, and now calls itself a “Payment/Ballot Drop Box”:
In the neighboring Town of Charlton where I actually live, the generic “Drop Box” is embedded in the wall of Town Hall, and specially says that it can be used for payments, elections, permits, or any other “town offices mail”:
So this latter one seems more like amenity=post_box with operator=Town of Charlton, where the other one seems more specialized.
I was about to suggest “mail drop”, figuring that the payments etc. are all forms of mail, even if hand-delivered. But then I stumbled upon one that explicitly doesn’t want to be associated with mail. So I went with amenity=drop_box, which already sees some use.
Well, if 6 counts as “some use” and there really isn’t anything better, then sure I guess. I’m thinking that ideally, these would have an operator= tagged, and maybe some drop_box= value describing what to put in them (with values of ballot, payment, and so forth)? Or just put that kind of detail in description=?
Is this the kind of ATYL where we can just add a page to the wiki (and maybe try to clarify/contrast the use of “drop box” on the post_box page) and just be done with it? Or should it go through The Proposal Process?
In my case, I just left it at amenity=drop_box, without qualification, because I honestly have no idea what that box is for. I probably would’ve had to go in and ask, or dig around on their website to figure out if some public-facing procedure requires the use of that box. Maybe something for the local mappers to work out.
A wiki page isn’t predicated on a formal proposal. But compared to the alternatives, amenity=drop_box hasn’t really “cleared the field” yet in terms of usage. 
Well, I guess I’m confused about what the alternatives are. It sounds like nobody has really found existing tagging that really fits. Though it may be that “drop box” is too generic as well. I’m not sure if all of these are different kinds of the same “drop box” amenity, or if they should be different amenity= types just like mailboxes and library dropoffs each are:
I don’t have much to add but I appreciate the discussion and folks adding various objects that are -ish this class of thing. Maybe genius will strike and this will be cracked soon enough.
Resurrecting this a bit because (1) I still think we have more questions than we have answers, and (2) I was thinking of it because I ran into a donation box, and I think donations may also be another kind of “drop box” that should be included into a tagging scheme or get its own tag or something. I’m currently thinking of cases in like a park, though I’m sure other non-profits and such have similar boxes. The first image below I took when going on a lovely walk through snow-covered woods in a nearby nature sanctuary this morning; the other two are just pulled from Wikimedia Commons as additional examples.
Taginfo counts 24 amenity=donation_box, which certainly seems reasonable, though it’s not documented, and one of them has a note that it’s talking about clothing donations rather than monetary ones.
Used item donation bins are tagged as amenity=recycling recycling_type=container recycling:clothes=yes. It’s sort of an awkward tagging convention: technically it functions as a form of reuse, which is kind of like recycling, but laypeople don’t really think of it as part of the recycling stream.
In the spirit of levity…
amentiy=recycling, recycling:money=yes
