Getting an Arlington Bounding Box of PBF Data

The best source for a current, relatively small data set for OSM PBF data I could find is the Geofabrik website, specifically the Virginia page, which has a PBF file for the state that weighs in at less than 230 MB. After downloading the virginia-latest.osm.pbf file, my next task will be to use osmosis to extract data from within a bounding box containing Arlington County.  The web application BoundingBox provides a nice visual way to do this.

Here is a screenshot of the Arlington County bounding box:

An interesting little curiosity I observed from looking at this bounding box is that little Andrew Ellicot Park lies within Arlington County, Fairfax County, and the city of Falls Church:

After Googling it, it is listed as the originial Western cornerstone of the District of Columbia:

Anyway, enough distraction, back to work.  With osmosis installed and the Virginia data on hand, I ran this command to get just the Arlington data:

$ osmosis --read-pbf file=virginia-latest.osm.pbf --bounding-box top=38.9342803955 left=-77.1723251343 bottom=38.8272895813 right=-77.032081604 --write-pbf file=arlington.osm.pbf

Only a few more steps to create a database and load this data into it:

$ createdb map_arlington $ psql -U postgres -d map_arlington -c 'CREATE EXTENSION postgis' $ imposm --read arlington.osm.pbf $ imposm --write -d map_arlington -U postgres

A database user other than postgres should be used, but this at least documents the process.