Remove postbox:type=community

[kjonosm]

Although in current use in Canada, shouldn't postbox:type=community rather be applied to amenity=letter_box instead of amenity=postbox?

[1ec5]

Canada’s community mailboxes serve both purposes, so the tagging guidelines currently say to prefer amenity=post_box. There was a discussion about community mailboxes (called cluster mailboxes in the U.S.) on the tagging list back in October with no resolution.

[tyrasd]

Tricky one… As far as I can see, use with amenity=post_box is fine for the "outgoing" part of these community mailbox sites. Not sure whether post_box:type=community would imply that at these locations inbound letter boxes also exists, or whether a mapper is meant to also map a corresponding amenity=letter_box feature alongside.

Now, I'm not so sure anymore whether post_box:type is the right tag for this property, though. As the tag is intended for the physical style, these should probably mapped as post_box:type=pillar, and the fact that they share the space with community/cluster mailboxes should go into a different attribute. For a very similar reason, I omitted the value post_box:type=meter. I guess we should at least be consistent. 🤔

[1ec5]

I guess so. But post_box:type is already next to useless in North America, where the definition of pillar could describe such a wide variety of designs. If Canada Post’s community mailboxes are pillars, then pillar would be 99% of all currently tagged postbox types in North America – and that’s after I went on a furious search through the U.S. to find non-pillars back in November. (They’re all of a historic nature.)

Perhaps the post_box:type field could be replaced by post_box:design and post_box:mounting fields in regions where those keys are more meaningful?

[1ec5]

#808 tracks adding post_box:design and/or model.