Feature Request: Support directional filters (north/south/east/west) similar to around

[chenlingmin]

Feature Request: Support directional filters (north/south/east/west) similar to around

Description

Currently, Overpass QL supports around for radius-based spatial queries and bbox/area for rectangular or administrative area filtering. However, there is no native support for directional filtering, such as selecting objects north, south, east, or west of a reference object. This is a common use case, for example: "all residential areas south of a school."

Use case / motivation

• Find all neighborhoods south of a school or all residential areas east of a road
• Analyze spatial relationships between OSM objects without exporting to GIS or Python
• Simplify queries that currently require around plus external coordinate filtering

Proposed feature

• Introduce new spatial filters, e.g., north_of, south_of, east_of, west_of
• Or extend around with a directional parameter:

way(around.school:500, direction=south);

• Functionality should be similar to around:
  • Use object center points
  • Apply both distance and directional constraints
  • Return objects satisfying both radius and direction conditions

Benefits

• Eliminates the need for post-processing in GIS or Python for directional filtering
• Makes Overpass QL more expressive and closer to a spatial query language
• Supports common real-world mapping and urban analysis scenarios

Additional context

• Internally, this could be implemented by calculating the dx/dy between candidate object centers and the reference object, similar to how around computes distances
• Directional filtering could optionally be combined with distance, e.g., "objects within 500m south of a school"

References / Related

• around implementation: calculates object centers and approximate planar distances
• Current workaround: export object centers and filter by coordinates externally