For part of a traffic simulation project I am currently working on we need country-wide road network data for Ireland. In the past, getting decent road network data for an area this large was quite a task (not to mention expensive and time consuming), however, with OpenStreetMap we have access to this type of data instantly, and for free! In order to download full country coverage all at once, all I had to do was turn to this extremely useful site, which provides links for daily excerpts of OpenStreetMap data for any country in Europe plus several non-country regions such as the Alps region, as well as select countries outside of Europe. It currently also features special coverage of Haiti.
Now that I have the OSM data downloaded, it should be relatively easy to import it into my PostGIS database using pgRouting and the osm2pgrouting import tool. More to come on this topic once I get things working nicely…
