I am working on a project where I need to get a shapefile of all roads in a given US county from open streetmap data, add some information to the county roads, then merge the individual county road shape files into a larger single shapefile using qgis.
My current process is to download the state roads map from the OSM repsitory that has my desired counties, and clip the larger state map to my desired county set of roads using qgis. I use the census bureau's county boundary shapefile to determine the boundary of the clip. The problem is that qgis seems to delete small sections of roads at the county boundary and I am unable to merge the "fabric" of the map together because there are gaps in road lines at the county boundary.
As an alternative approach, I have stared to research using the OSM overpass api to query for a set of county roads. If I can query OSM for all roads within a given county and download as a shapefile, should I then be able to merge the individual county road maps into a larger map without gaps and avoid the problem I have with clipping?
Are there any articles that describe the overpass api query for getting roads within a known administrative boundary, like a US county?
