Abi Broom submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to Royal Mail, for details of last collection times for all their postboxes. The response was a zip file containing two Word documents, together containing details for 60,121 postboxes - as compared with the 116,088 records in the response to Tom Taylor's FOI request for postbox locations.
The data presented below has been extracted from the Word documents, which were named Part1.doc and Part2.doc. The Part2 data has been split because the file contained two Word tables with incompatible formats. The break between these two tables also marks a division between two data sets of very different quality: in the second section of the Part2 file, almost all postboxes from the locations list are included; whereas in the first section of the Part2 file, and throughout the Part1 file, only about half the postboxes from the locations list are included. When the records are sorted in postbox number order, it seems that, very consistently, every second postbox has been omitted from these two earlier portions of the data.
The fields in each record in all the files are the same:
The two file formats are:
| Data | Record count | TSV format | CSV format |
|---|---|---|---|
| All: AB - ZE areas inclusive | 60,121 | file | file |
| Part1 file: AB10 117 - LU7 97 | 30,048 | file | file |
| Part2 file, first section: M1 1 - WD7 276 | 25,655 | file | file |
| Part2 file, second section: WD7 277 - ZE3 79 | 4,418 | file | file |
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Last update: 2009-03-24 22:34