Hi,
i’m trying to render my own Layers with Openstreetmap.
So far, everything works as expected, but sometimes, buildings do interfere with streets. I assume this keeps happening because I’m just guessing the thickness of the streets (Residential 15px, primary 25px etc.).
This behavior will lead to problems (especially when zooming in and out). I’d like to find out a better way to decide how big a street is.
May anybody help me out?
Thank you 
Hi, and welcome to the OSM forum!
In some cases, you will get explicit data about the street’s width from the width key. However, such a tag is only present on about 1.1% of the streets in OSM. A bit more common (4.6% - all numbers from Taginfo) is the lanes key for the number of lanes, which can be multiplied with some reasonable value for each lane’s width. Furthermore, there are some experimental ideas such as mapping streets as areas in addition to the way, but these haven’t really caught on yet.
So most of the time, you will unfortunately still have to guess based on highway values and some related tags such as oneway. At least that’s what I do …