Bunting Labs Introduces new OSM API
Bunting Labs’ new API to download OSM data is looking good. I’m not an OSM power user and every time I try to use Overpass to download some data from OpenStreetMap, I’d struggle for an hour and then download one of Geofabrik’s Shapefiles instead. Overpass is extremely powerful, but its syntax is just as hard to understand—which is ok; powerful software is always complex.
The new API is less powerful but more approachable for occasional users like me. It abstracts away much of OSMs complexity, providing a simpler syntax for accessing data via HTTP requests, and it returns neat GeoJSON data.