Mapping a service counter / walk up window?

Hi all. The building I work in has these service counters built into the wall, with a window and a small gap to pass documents under. I think it would be useful to tag these, but what would you call them? Is there an established tag out there that I’m just missing?

What are they? Information office / ticket sales etc

It’s just a counter / window where a member of the public would come to interact with a given office. Treasurer, Clerk, Zoning, etc. Asking questions, submitting forms, making tax payments.

For an administrative office or 24 hour petrol station, this is a ‘hatch’. In a sports ground, it’s a ‘ticket hatch’. In a bank or similar, it would be a ‘cashier’s hatch’, although the bank would like to use the term ‘counter’, ‘cash counter’, ‘cashier’ or similar. Historically, the design might have been a pair of small timber doors. Robberies and staff assaults mean that employers now tend to provide a permanent fixed pane of security glass (of whatever strength), perhaps with a roller blind behind (or maybe a notice saying ‘closed’). Under the window, there is a ‘cash tray’. Sometimes they are deep like this: Bank Cash Tray - Premium Quality & Design bus sometimes quite shallow or have booth options. The equivalent for documents would be a document tray, but I’m not sure the term is used in the real world.

/mansplaining

It’s not really an amenity=* and not entrance=* as you can’t enter through it, so I think barrier=hatch would be the way to go.

There is amenity=reception_desk but I think that is more appropriate for a place that welcomes you in and sends you where you need to go (which might be a hatch).

I’m wondering if your suggestion might be ‘over-mapping’. Some buildings might have dozens of these - and then more on the next storey. :slightly_smiling_face:

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It probably is. :sweat_smile:

We’re doing indoor mapping of our County Office, and I was hoping to have some way of indicating where the public would want to go to deal with each public-facing department. But then, if they’re in the building, it would be pretty hard to miss the big counter and glass panel with “ASSESSMENTS” above the window.

It’s probably enough to know which level each office is on.

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It should be accept for indoor= , but you should be drawing the =room and =corridor together for it to make sense. If not, office= + level= + level:ref= is enough.
One problem now is indoor=door mostly added with door= over half =yes , overlapping with another logical and expected door= + indoor=yes method. I won’t want to use indoor=window if it would duplicate window= + indoor=yes , assuming window= inside building= won’t be rendered at least visibly when not =skylight upwards.

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Adding the physical window would be easy in a SIT-mapped building: Just add a node into the wall (or room outline) and tag it with window=* and level=*.

But I guess the main challenge is to describe the purpose of the window as the location to interact with some particular service:

I don’t think there’s an established tag. I remember, but can’t currently find, a discussion about service windows in the context of drive-thrus. At the time, there was some question whether this really should be tied to the fact that it’s a window – after all, if someone hands food out of a door, that serves the exact same function. So maybe some more generic term would be best if a new tag is invented. It could then be added to the same node as the window=* tag which describes the physical object.

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The important difference is that it is easy for a human to get through a door, but impractical to get through a window (unless you are 13 and have been locked out of the house while your parents are out and find a small back window ajar and know how to disassemble the window).

In an government office or bank, name=* or ref=* or office=* might be useful where each hatch is a completely different function and it isn’t just ‘description as a name’.

I feel seen.

I did notice there is walkup_window, which, in spite of “window” being in the key and the wiki being written for exterior windows of some kind of retail establishment, seems like it gets closer to the purpose.

Leaving the issue aside for now. Plenty of well-supported indoor mapping elements to tackle in the mean time.