Total road length in Kilometers for a country

With https://ohsome.org/apps/dashboard/ you can select your country, and then select highway=*, select ways, select length and click on results.

One option is to use this Perl script, which will calculate the length of roads in an OSM file: osm-length-2.pl For more details, see this post by Frederik Ramm on the talk mailing list: [OSM-talk] Statistics on road network length?

Some of the other posts in that mailing list thread may be helpful.

You can use the free CartoType tool ctm1_info on a CartoType map. Both ctm1_info and the makemap tool to create CartoType maps are free for non-commercial use. For example, to get the total road length for Sweden:

ctm1_info sweden.ctm1 -n -aroad/
ctm1_info built using CartoType 6.3.9557

Layer 'road/' has 941,643 objects:
    line objects: 939,897; length = 482121.61 km
    polygon objects: 1746; area = 3.79 sq km

There is a python package that does exactly that.

It is basically a wrapper on top of Overpass that handles the calls.

It supports country-size regions :)

https://github.com/JoaoCarabetta/osm-road-length

It is super easy to use,

Install it: pip install osm-road-length

And run:

import osm_road_length from shapely import wkt

geometry = wkt.loads('POLYGON((-43.2958811591311 -22.853167273541693,-43.30961406928735 -23.035275736044728,-43.115980036084224 -23.02010939749927,-43.157178766552974 -22.832917893834313,-43.2958811591311 -22.853167273541693))')

length = osm_road_length.get(geometry)

For regular updates, Vclaw's answer is probably best. But I don't think what you were trying to do is difficult in qgis. Here's a tutorial.

Perhaps this question helps. I am currently waiting for someone to confirm that this is a good approach :)