Contents

Pyrosm

Pyrosm is a Python library for reading OpenStreetMap from Protocolbuffer Binary Format -files (*.osm.pbf) into Geopandas GeoDataFrames. Pyrosm makes it easy to extract various datasets from OpenStreetMap pbf-dumps including e.g. road networks, buildings, Points of Interest (POI), landuse, natural elements, administrative boundaries and much more. Fully customized queries are supported which makes it possible to parse any kind of data from OSM, even with more specific filters.

Pyrosm is easy to use and it provides a somewhat similar user interface as OSMnx. The main difference between pyrosm and OSMnx is that OSMnx reads the data using an OverPass API, whereas pyrosm reads the data from local OSM data dumps that are downloaded from the PBF data providers (Geofabrik, BBBike). This makes it possible to read data faster, thus allowing to parse OSM data covering large regions faster.

For instance, parsing all roads from the state of New York (USA) with a “basic” work laptop (16GB memory, SSD, and Intel Core i5 CPU), takes less than 3 minutes and parsing the buildings from the same region takes less than 4 minutes (see benchmarks for details):

_images/NY_roads_and_buildings.PNG

Current features

  • download PBF data easily from hundreds of locations across the world

  • read street networks (separately for driving, cycling, walking and all-combined)

  • read buildings from PBF

  • read Points of Interest (POI) from PBF

  • read landuse from PBF

  • read “natural” from PBF

  • read boundaries from PBF (such as administrative borders)

  • read any other data from PBF by using a custom user-defined filter

  • filter data based on bounding box

  • export networks as a directed graph to igraph, networkx and pandana

When should I use Pyrosm?

Pyrosm can of course be used whenever you need to parse data from OSM into geopandas GeoDataFrames. However, pyrosm is better suited for situations where you want to fetch data for whole city or larger regions (even whole country).

If you are interested to fetch OSM data for smaller areas such as neighborhoods, or search data around a specific location/address, we recommend using OSMnx which is more flexible in terms of specifying the area of interest. That being said, it is also possible to extract neighborhood level information with pyrosm and filter data based on a bounding box (see docs).

License

Pyrosm is licensed under MIT (see license).

Data © Geofabrik GmbH, BBBike and OpenStreetMap Contributors. All data from the OpenStreetMap is licensed under the OpenStreetMap License.

Getting started

Contents

Reference Guide

Indices and tables

Installation