OSMXAPI is dead or useless recently, apparently a victim of popularity overload.

I needed to grab a whole city in the U.S. to check for braided streets. I've been using OSMXAPI in the past because the main API only allows small areas. But recently OSMXAPI has been overloaded or unresponsive. Even worse, when I have gotten through, it has been giving me error messages that a new restriction mechanism is in place. It has rejected my requests, even when they are ridiculously small (one was only 250kb through the main API).

The osmxapi error message suggested using the planet file instead. This sounded bad, because I did not want to download 4GB just to get a few megabytes of city data. But I found a great set of extract files for the US at

http://downloads.cloudmade.com/north_america/united_states

It looks like they update them weekly. Thanks guys!

I am using Osmosis to pull out my desired city by bounding box. This looks like a good solution.