I would like to obtain the total area of road and streets in a map area (forgive the repetition, but I thought maybe map region is not that specific). My intention is to calculate the density of pedestrians and vehicles in the areas they can use. asked 07 Mar '16, 15:58  Fa__ |
2 Answers:
In most cases no, because the width of most roads isn't stored in OSM. There have been attempts to store highway areas (most successfully via an "area:highway" tag), and some roads have a "width" tag, so you could maybe do something with them. Maybe you could estimate "if it's a secondary road it'll be X meters wide" externally to OSM and use that in your calculations? answered 07 Mar '16, 16:02  SomeoneElse ♦ |
In order to get the complete way length of all ways in an OSM file, do a search on this FAQ site for "length". Maybe with the result you can calculate or estimate the covered area. answered 07 Mar '16, 16:43  stephan75 |
How should I use that estimation? Is it possible to obtain the total length of every kind of road separately and calculate the area using a estimated width for every one of them?
An option is to download a dataset of roads and load them into a GIS software like QGIS. The length calculation is straightforward. You could even create polygons by buffering the lines. And it is possible to use a data attribute for buffering.