Need to tag some common UK amenities

Specifially, does anyone have any thoughts on how to tag

Ambulance Station
Just using amenity=ambulance_station doesn’t render

Mobile Library
Using amenity=library | mobile=true | opening_hours=Fr
(for a mobile library that is present/open only on Friday, and is there for the working day Friday)
This just renders as a static library (perhaps I need to write a dynamic link library to render a dynamic library: Putting some wheels on would be nice.)

I am talking about a ML that travels to a specific location on a specific day and stays there for the “whole” day. It appears some UK councils and countries outside the UK, have a “library bus” which travels a specific route, spending say 20 min at each stop.

Dog Faeces Bin
Using amenity=dog_bin
This doesn’t render and some non-UK speakers might think it’s a place for dumping unwanted dogs (!)
Some councils do actually call them that: "dog bin"s
Using waste_basket with some parameter makes it sound as if the … material … is not being contained in a closed container !

Sorting Office / Delivery Office / Enquiry Office
Here in the UK, the Royal Mail (who sort/deliver mail) is a separate organisation from the Post Office (stamps, posta lorders, fish licences, vehicle tax etc).
I’ve come across people who tag delivery offices as post_office, which gives the wrong impression.
What, if anything, is the correct tag ?

Directionality of road-signs
If I just want to put in a road-sign (such as “road narrows”), how can I say “this applies only if you’re looking in THAT direction”, because, obviously, the road is going to “widen” if you’re looking the other way. I’m assuming that it’s not practical for whatever reason, to do a full survey of road widths.
road_sign=“road narrows” | facing_way=0/1/-1 perhaps ?

Enough for now
Richard [in SG2]

Don’t worry about it not rendering. Lots of things don’t render. If you think something should be rendered on the main slippy map you can request it.

amenity=ambulance_station sounds fine to me.

Regarding the mobile library, this is a real problem. I have run into the same problem and in the end opted not to add the mobile library. It may well be out of the scope of OSM.

Dog waste bins - I don’t add these but that may be a rather short sighted decision on my part. I can certainly see why some people would be interested in knowing where these are. I don’t think it is of general enough interest, however, so would personally prefer not to see them rendered even if they are included in the database. amenity=dog_waste_bin seems a reasonable, unambiguous tag to me.

OSM is an international project and tags have to be generic enough to be widely supported but specific enough to accurately convey information. The post office tag is well established and rendered. Creating a new value on the amenity key for sorting or delivery offices would be overkill and add more complexity than is useful or necessary. What you can do to convey the information is add an operator tag. So a delivery office could be tagged like so:

amenity=post_office
operator=Royal Mail ltd
opening_hours=*
name=*

Regarding road signs, these aren’t usually added in OSM AFAIK. Nodes don’t have directionality although NaPTAN bus stops have a bearing tag which seems a reasonable solution to add directionality to any node. However in this instance it is more useful to apply the width to the road in question.

Split the road where it narrows and again if and where it widens. Add a width tag to the narrow section and say how wide the road is in meters. The value should be the narrowest that the road gets. Obviously if there is a great deal of narrowing and widening then you may need to do this several times but it does allow the possibility of routing engines using the data.

Hope this helps!

I disagree with this. At a post office you can to post letters/parcels, buy stamps, get a driving licence etc. Whereas these are not usually possible at a sorting office etc. Some of them are not open to the public at all.
So I think tagging it as a post office would be unhelpful and misleading. I don’t think the operator tag helps much, as most people don’t know the difference between Royal Mail and the Post Office anyway. Also, there are some actual post offices operated by other companies, eg WH Smith.

So I would suggest a different tag. Maybe something with office= http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:office
eg office=delivery ? This would also be useful for the various parcel/courier companies etc.

Regarding narrow roads, you could tag the narrow section as narrow=yes http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:narrow
Its not as precise as tagging it with the width, but its less work in measuring it. Or if the number of lanes changes, you could tag that. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:lanes

Fair enough. What about the ones that are open to the public and offer most of the services the normal post offices provide? :wink:

Well I do, you do, the OP does. I think you may be under-estimating people there. :slight_smile:

Not sure how that’s relevant - and the operator tag is used in those circumstances.

Good solution, I actually prefer that too. I hadn’t thought of that.

I think you’re right. I’m going to start noting these too.

Nick