Building Heights

General talk
1

Dear OSM,

I’m hoping to pick your brains for ideas please. I come here today because I am trying to source building height data for major cities in the US and Europe, for an academic project which is looking at how to classify streets as street canyons or not; street canyons being those that are bordered by tall buildings.

Having done some reading I know that within the buildings aspect of OSM, there is a ‘building:levels=’ tag, and also a ‘building:height=’ tag. It is my understanding that they are well used in some places, and not in others.

So my thinking is that I might be able to write some code which requests data from an OSM API, the data being determined by a bounding box I submit, and also a request that I’m only returned polygons of buildings, and whether the polygon has the ‘building:levels=’ or ‘building:height=’ tags populated. I could then do this on a loop for each of the cities I am interested in. Or something like that.

I’d appreciate any ideas or thoughts that people might have

Thanks

James

2

Hi James

Have you seen this wiki?

I only have experience with the online overpass API, http://overpass-turbo.eu/ . It has a wizard that helps you build the query you need. For your search, you could, for example, enter (in the wizard):

 ("building:levels"=* or "building:height"=* or (building=* and height=*)) in Rotterdam

In the second window, you can either use the map, or the data output.

Kind regards,
arvdk

3

Hi @arvdk . No, I had not. It looks like just what I need - thanks!