Tutorial: Mapping parcel lockers with OpenStreetMap and DuckDB (Part 1)

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2024-04-17 16:00:02

Parcel lockers, which allow users to pick up (and often drop-off) packages at an automated kiosk, have grown in popularity in recent years. They offer benefits for both customers and delivery companies:

We recently posted an interactive Honeycomb Map of all of the parcel lockers in Berlin, Germany. Here is an embedded version of the map, which uses Honeycomb Data Explorer to allow you to filter the data by operator:

This tutorial (Part 1) will guide you through using OpenStreetMap and DuckDB to find and organize data about parcel lockers in Berlin. While the tutorial is focused on parcel lockers in Berlin, the techniques and data sources described can be applied to many types of infrastructure worldwide.

When starting any data project, the initial step is often exploring what data is available. In this section, I describe how I investigated two open data sources - Overture Maps and OpenStreetMap. If you are just interested in how to fetch the parcel locker data, you can skip ahead to the next section.

For this project I was interested in public sources of parcel locker locations that had licensing which allowed commercial reuse. Even though parcel locker locations are by-definition public, none of the large locker operators in Berlin (DHL Packstation and Amazon) publish lists of their locker locations. Rather than getting first-party data directly from operators, I decided to explore public data sources.