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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

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Fa__
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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?

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answered 07 Mar '16, 16:02

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SomeoneElse ♦
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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?

(07 Mar '16, 16:35) Fa__

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.

(11 Mar '16, 06:30) joost schouppe

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.

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answered 07 Mar '16, 16:43

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stephan75
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question asked: 07 Mar '16, 15:58

question was seen: 4,470 times

last updated: 11 Mar '16, 06:30

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