Please use this thread for discussions about the 2026 Q3 project. Further details can be found on the OSM Wiki page.
“Public Toilets and Drinking Water” - perhaps a rephrasing might be in order?
It sounds just a little like the media when they report a Met Office “Yellow Snow Warning”. 
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Whilst you’re not wrong.. it does seem to be grabbing people’s attention like this!
I was curious on the use of amenity=sanitary_dump_station so far, and at a glance of Taginfo map it shows a cluster where I’d expect. Along canals, around the north coast 500, etc.
Boaters I’ve spoken with have said provision isn’t fantastic in parts of the country.
Can’t believe there’s only 267 in the country though!
FYI: I’ve started some analysis of the mapping of amenity=toilets at https://osm.mathmos.net/toilets/. I’m currently collecting the following tags on amenity=toilets objects: uprn, addr:postcode, name, fixme, note, access, fee, charge, opening_hours, wheelchair, changing_table, operator, operator:wikidata, check_date/survey:date. We can then do some analysis of the values and track the history over time. Are there any other tags in the list that might be of significant interest?
In my Survey Me! tool, toilets that are missing one or more of the tags access, fee, opening_hours, wheelchair are flagged as being “incomplete”. I wanted a reasonably small set of the most useful attributes to record, where a quick ground survey could complete them. Is this a sensible set of the most useful attribute tags to have?
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Could I ask what pc_inner means?
Some other tags that might be associated with such facilities:
- level=* - what storey the toilets are on.
- payment:coins, payment:cash=* - I have no idea if public toilets take card / phone payments.
- supervised=*
- changing_table:adult=*
- shower=* - at airports, train stations, beaches, etc.
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Fortunately, yes. The Royal Parks have finally noticed that many people don’t carry small change any more. For some reason this one was tagged with just payment:credit_cards=only, which is unlikely to be correct for any payment:contactless terminal in the UK.
Sorry, that was left in the list in error. (It’s part of the internal representation of the addr:postcode tag in my database table - I store the two halves of the postcode in separate columns.)
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Thank you for sharing the Survey Me tool! Slightly off-topic, but I’ve already found some post boxes that I need to add which are marked on that tool, so I’ll go out and survey the remaining ones. Quick question though: Should the final “D” that appear on some post box codes be added? I added them where I have found them so if not then I’ll go and remove them.
I’ll sort out the toilets I find in North Wales as well.
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Yes, if that’s what it says on the box, since it’s part of the official number. (The tool will remove and D or P suffices before attempting the matching.)
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For what it’s worth I did do a layer for waterway=sanitary_dump_station as part of a half-baked attempt at a Narrowboat Amenities MapComplete layer. IIRC it doesn’t include the amenities for people in caravans but could probably be cloned and used as a starting point for one.
Edit: so in viewing the layer earlier to see if I had any handling for amenity=sanitary_dump_station as well as waterway=sanitary_dump_station something apparently broke even though I don’t think I changed anything. I’m currently trying to track down why every single piece of the Studio interface is saying “No allowCopy set”.
Editt 2: I think I have fixed this by manually pasting "allowCopy": true, into the source of all the layers that were complaining to my browser console. It appears to be loading for me again.
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There are some public toilets in my area that charge a fee, but the charge only applies to the male and female toilets. The accessible and/or Changing Places toilets are free, but require a RADAR key. Is there a way to tag this on one node/way, or do I need to have separate amenity=toilets nodes for each?
I guess you could do fee = yes + fee:conditional = no @ centralkey + centralkey = nks.
But possibly the opening times might be different too. You could handle that with a similar opening_hours:conditional statement, but it would probably be simpler (and more likely date users will interpret things correctly) if you used two different OSM objects for the two different parts of the toilet facilities.
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For public facing taps in cemeteries and allotments, I have been tagging these as man_made=water_tap and not amenity=drinking_water, despite a vast majority (all?) of them being drinkable in the UK. I’ve also added drinking_water=conditional. Is this the right approach?
Both Gwynedd and Conwy (and I suspect others) have trialled a system where they get companies and organisations to provide public toilets through a scheme. In the LL33 postcode area there are 2 to my knowledge: The community hall in Llanfairfechan, and one of the cafés in Abergwyngregyn. Only the one in Aber is mapped: Node: 12138962489 | OpenStreetMap
What is the right way to map these? They share opening hours with the location in which they are in, but they are `access=yes`. In Aber it is its own node, would that be the way to go about it? Are there some other tags that could be used to indicate the status of the toilets as public through a council led scheme despite being in private locations?
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You could use toilets:access=*, which really ought to be documented in the wiki. The toilets in a pub or café would usually be toilets:access=customers, and toilets:access=yes or toilets:access=permissive for a council-backed scheme.
A key to describe the scheme might be useful, but I have no idea what would work.
I’d probably map the toilets as a separate node in this case, as it’s then more likely that they’ll be interpreted correctly by data users. I’d add access=yes or access=permissive and a note=* to explain the situation. It would be good to somehow tag the scheme, but I’m not sure if there’s a standardised way of doing this. network=* perhaps?
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Changing Places is a consortium that campaigns for better provision of accessible toilets in the UK. They have a standard for such toilets and facilities meeting it can brand themselves as “Changing Places”.
I’ve got a list of the 2665 registered “Changing Places” toilets, and imported it into my Chain Reaction tool: https://osm.mathmos.net/chains/Q104870811/. This matches the data to OSM objects with brand:wikidata=Q104870811. (Using the brand tags seemed the best way to tag these as “Changing Places”, as they’re all independently operated. The specific facilities at each site can still be be mapped with the various accessibility tags.)
I’ve done a few searches to look for objects mentioning “Changing Places” in other descriptive tags and added the tags to those. After that, we still only have only 38 of the 2665 “Changing Places” toilets mapped/tagged as such. Some will be hidden away in libraries, leisure centres and other public buildings, but I think quite a lot are stand-alone facilities in public spaces. So there’s quite a lot of these to be mapped.
Missing locations will be flagged in my Survey Me! tool in the “Retail Chains” category (because it was simplest to pull in the data through Chain Reaction).
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I saw a Changing Places sign at some services on Tuesday and wondered about it as I knew about the standard. Happily now added.
I thought toiletmap.org.uk had given us explicit permission to use there data, but I can’t find any mention of it anywhere. Am I miss remembering? Has anyone reached out to them recently?
Oh Toilet Map: Our Data was seeded from OSM?
A lot of data added around 2016-09.
jq '.[].created_at | split("T")[0]' 'toilets.json' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
142 "2014-11-20"
159 "2014-11-19"
1775 "2016-09-13"
6345 "2016-09-14"
OSM data used may have been a bit old at that point.