[OSM-newbies] Order of segments in a way

[Stephen Gower]

  [Sorry, I must have deleted the blank line between headers and body
  in my mail editor, trying again]

  I'm a bit confused! In a number of places on the wiki and elsewhere
  there are oblique comments about the importance of ways being well
  ordered, but I'm not exactly sure what this means in practice. My
  instinct is that one (for example) residential road should be one
  way, because otherwise a search for the street name will get
  multiple hits. On the other hand if it's got lots of loops and
  splits (or even just one), then the renderers will get confused
  about where to put the name.
  
  http://www.openstreetmap.org/index.html?lat=51.741&lon=-1.223&zoom=17&layers=0B
  is an example of a really messy single street in Oxford, which I
  remapped as it's part of an ongoing development and had changed
  from what was there. Reliance Way is a really complicated set of
  branches and loops, with houses on all of them - in an ideal world,
  the developers/council would have given them all different names,
  but that's not happened. It's currently made up of two ways. 

  Should I
  (a) combine these two ways into one, so that a search for Reliance
  Way only gets one hit
  (b) split up these two ways into the 12 or more component parks,
  all named Reliance Way
  or do something else?

  Ta
  
  s