Larger End Goal: To have a map embedded within an app or a website where people are able to easily view where the nearest postbox or post office is, and also be able to add new post offices and postboxes to the map if they aren’t yet recorded in the map.

Step 1: Display both post offices and post boxes on a uMap, using the Overpass API. These items should be on two separate layers, as the icons need to be styled differently.

Current issue: There are lots of post offices in the world, and even more postboxes. This causes the uMap to time out with a 429 error of “problem in the response.”

The current map: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/postboxes_528331#13/53.5705/10.0067

Current suggestions:

• Use an alternative public instance: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API#Public_Overpass_API_instances
• Run an Overpass API instance locally (really seems to be overkill for what’s needed for this project
• Download the information of all post_box’s and post_office’s points and store that locally. Not sure what would be the best way to do this though. It looks like you can download all the OS data following the instructions here, but 1.5TB is a bit much to handle.
• Maybe use the Overpass API itself to download the data (perhaps in chunks), although it seems we either already reached some limit or it is perhaps already overloaded and we don’t want to make it worse unless we’re sure it’s ok.

Current Questions:

• What is the best way to get all (amenity=post_box OR amenity=post_office) points from OSM without overloading anyone or downloading the whole OSM dataset?
• If we do go the route of downloading a copy of the data and querying this locally, what is the best way to get a snapshot of the relevant points from OSM without us causing unwelcome load to someone’s server?

What we hope for:

A way to get real time, in-sync information so that we don’t need to continuously update the database ourselves. To be able to associate images that people take with the data (maybe would need a local copy, but I wonder if Mapillary can somehow also work here. (Something like how Wheelmap does it would be very cool.)