I was having fun yesterday surveying all the post boxes in Belfast BT1 & BT2.
A couple of practical points:
it looks like many of the post box reference numbers have changed slightly since the 2013 FOI dataset was published - not the numbers themselves, but a lot of them now have a letter suffix (usually a ‘D’ - I’m note sure what that denotes…. the ‘meter’ design boxes usually now have a ‘P’ suffix, which I gather is cos they accept parcels). When mapping these on OSM last night, I used the current post box numbers as displayed on the boxes, although I fear this will make the PostHoc tool think that the matching is worse now as a result of my efforts
BT1 & BT2 have quite a few ‘type C’ boxes (2 slots, 1 box). It seems each slot (or ‘aperture’, to use the POL term) has its own reference number. Generally the pair of apertures have the ‘same’ number only the second one has a ‘10’ or ‘1’ appended to the beginning (e.g. ‘BT1 10’ and ‘BT1 1010’ are the two slots in the Type C box outside Belfast Central Post Office on the High Street). Again, this may confuse Post Hoc (and seems to have been the reason for several ‘unmapped boxes’ reported by the tool) as OSM’s tagging thinks the ‘ref=’ tag pertains to the post box, not to the aperture, so for dual-slot boxes I had to put in two ref numbers, separated with a semicolon.
The tool knows about the D and P suffixes, and removes them before comparing with the Royal Mail data. So it should be fine that you’d added the full refs as found on the boxes.
The tool can also cope with multiple semi-colon separated refs on the same OSM node. For a typical dual-aperture Type C box, you’d list both refs. The tool will split them up and record two “post boxes”, one for each ref. So provided the Royal Mail data has an entry for each ref, the matching should work. One thing to watch here is that you shouldn’t put an spaces around the semi-colon. That’s an OSM standard for multivalued keys. (Unless it’s opening_hours=* where the OSM spec says you should!)
If anything doesn’t seem to be working as it should once the OSM data is refreshed in the tool, do let me know and I’ll take a look.
Oh well, that sounds like my fears were unfounded and Post Hoc will cope 100%
/waits eagerly for the next refresh/
One thing I totally noticed when doing the survey is how Royal Mail had slashed Last Collection Times compared to the last time these boxes had been surveyed - most are now ‘Last Collection 9am (7am on Saturdays)’.
Does anyone know what the ‘D’ suffix on a post box reference number means?
I believe the ‘D’ suffix means it is emptied as part of a delivery round. Practically speaking, the collection time is best interpreted as “not emptied before 9am” because I’ve seen them emptied many hours later!
Cheers!
And yeah, I was thinking the ‘Last Collection Time’ must be taken with a pinch of salt, as there are about 3 dozen post boxes in a couple of square miles all with identical times, and there’s no way they’re all gonna be simultaneously emptied!
I’m not sure if this is of any use for your tools or to @philipcullen, but I’ve just noticed that the FHRS LocalAuthorityBusinessID field (sometimes tagged with fhrs:local_authority_id) used by Fareham is the UPRN of the food business. I’m not sure if any other local authorities do this.
Even when they weren’t collected as part of the local postie’s delivery rounds, there would be five or six post boxes with the same collection time. I think it was always designed to mean “anything posted by this time will be collected on the day” and as you’ve noticed, they are getting less specific but guarantee that the collection won’t be before 9am.
