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I want to get width or area of the road data in OSM. All of the road data from OSM are lines, so I cannot get the width or area info of these roads. If these were polygon data, I would have calculated the area using QGIS.. But these are in lines, so I can't know how wide the road is. If there is a way to check the width of the road, please let me know... Thanks in advance.

asked 25 Jan '22, 18:02

hshshshshshs's gravatar image

hshshshshshs
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The width tag is used to describe how wide a way is. However, the width tag isn't used very often on highways (about 1% of highway ways have this tag). I also tend to see this tag used more often on trails than on roads.

Beyond that, you would have to come up with other methods to approximate the width. For example, you could use the number of lanes along with an average lane width to come up with a close approximation. If a way doesn't even have the lanes tagged, then you might have to come up with an approximation based on the highway=* tag (e.g. define residential as 9m, trunk as 20m, etc.).

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answered 25 Jan '22, 18:58

alester's gravatar image

alester
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In addition to lanes using simple rules of thumb for width of each road class can work well: I used this approach for land cover data in 2011.

(26 Jan '22, 13:03) SK53 ♦

If you have a high resolution image, it's possible to get a approximate value by measure the width of the road on the screen with a ruler and compare this with the scale in the upper corner of JOSM.

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answered 26 Jan '22, 07:54

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Msiipola
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and do that a million times ?

(11 May '23, 19:52) MartinMTB

if you want to know how wide the road is drawn, vs how wide it really is, i would take a look at the source code of the tile servers, because that code obviously knows.

i used lanes, that doesn't work, i looked around in LA where some highways have 6 lanes, they are drawn the same way as 3 lane roads

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answered 11 May '23, 19:51

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MartinMTB
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question asked: 25 Jan '22, 18:02

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last updated: 11 May '23, 19:52

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum