Looking for geodata of Europe's major roads

Question

As stated in the title, I'm currently looking for a shapefile/other geodata source of Europe's major roads (highways). If anybody knows a free datasource (or a possibility to extract that data from Open Street Map without processing the world file), it would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can download nightly OpenStreetMap Europe snapshots from here:

http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/

As of today:

• europe.osm.bz2 03-May-2012 06:31 11G OpenStreetMap data, bzip2 compressed
• europe.osm.pbf 03-May-2012 00:56 7.8G OpenStreetMap data, protobuf binary format

Using GDAL/OGR you can then extract the roads with a SQL statement (see http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogr_sql.html) by querying e.g. the type.

Answer 2

Following from markusN, there are OpenStreetmap downloads at GeoFabrik that are in shapefile format and therefore don't require processing (depending on the dataset).

Alternately, there's one here: http://www.mapcruzin.com/free-europe-arcgis-maps-shapefiles.htm

But at 900MB, I suspect its not abstracted.

Answer 3

Thought I'd share what I found through lengthy research. It seems, the UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) has conducted a transportation network census in 2005. Hidden deep inside their Website, I have found this:

http://www.unece.org/transport/areas-of-work/transport-statistics/statistics-and-data-online/e-roads/transmainwp6e-roads-census-2005.html

You have to download the ArcReader-project, which, when unzipped, contains routable, simplified shapefiles of all major roads along with some useful metadata. Same applies to the train network which can also be found on the page.