fetch_osm: Fetch OpenStreetMap data via the Overpass API

In MetricGraph: Random Fields on Metric Graphs

Fetch OpenStreetMap data via the Overpass API

Description

A drop-in replacement for osmdata::osmdata_sf() that sidesteps the Overpass server-status check osmdata performs before each download.fetch_osm() builds the Overpass query with osmdata's helpers, POSTs it directly with the curl package, and then hands the raw response back to osmdata for parsing.

Usage

fetch_osm(
  bbox,
  key = "highway",
  value = NULL,
  endpoint = "https://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter",
  timeout = 180,
  user_agent = "MetricGraph-R-package",
  cache_path = NULL,
  retries = 2,
  ...
)

Arguments

bbox	A bounding box, passed to osmdata::opq(). May be a length-4 numeric vector c(xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax), an sf::bbox object, or any other form accepted by osmdata::opq().
key	OSM key to filter on, e.g. "highway". Passed to osmdata::add_osm_feature(). Use NULL to skip the feature filter and fetch everything in the bbox.
value	Optional character vector of values for key, e.g. c("motorway", "motorway_link").
endpoint	Overpass endpoint URL, or a character vector of URLs that are tried in order. Defaults to the main overpass-api.de endpoint. Mirror URLs (e.g. ⁠https://overpass.kumi.systems/api/interpreter⁠) work too.
timeout	Server-side query timeout in seconds. Forwarded to both osmdata::opq() and the HTTP request.
user_agent	String sent as the User-Agent HTTP header.
cache_path	Optional path. If provided and the file already exists, the download is skipped and the cached response is parsed instead. If provided and the file does not exist, the response is saved there for re-use.
retries	Number of times a request to each endpoint is retried after a transient failure (HTTP 429 or 5xx, or a connection error), with exponential backoff between attempts.
...	Forwarded to osmdata::add_osm_feature().

Value

An osmdata list with elements ⁠$osm_points⁠, ⁠$osm_lines⁠, ⁠$osm_polygons⁠, ⁠$osm_multilines⁠, ⁠$osm_multipolygons⁠ (same structure as osmdata::osmdata_sf()). Tags appear as columns of each sf data frame.

See Also

metric_graph_from_osm() which wraps this and returns a ready-to-use metric_graph.

Examples

## Not run: 
## All highway ways in a small bbox around San Jose.
osm <- fetch_osm(
  bbox  = c(-122.10, 37.22, -121.80, 37.45),
  key   = "highway",
  value = c("motorway", "motorway_link", "primary", "secondary")
)
head(osm$osm_lines[, c("highway", "oneway", "geometry")])

## End(Not run)

MetricGraph documentation built on Nov. 11, 2026, 1:09 a.m.