[OSM-newbies] Working on Manhattan

[topo at joelertola.com]

Hi all,

I just discovered openstreetmap last week. I live in New York city and  
just to get my feet wet I took my GPS over to Union Square park and  
tried to map it. The gps track is very bad, (I guess because of all  
the tall buildings around the park,) but I did manage to draw the park  
and the foot paths in it. I was pleased to see my additions today:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=40.73859&lon=-73.99056&zoom=16

Currently most of the streets in Manhattan are marked as residential.  
So I started taging the major streets in Manhattan as primary or  
Secondary. I am just using my general knowledge of the city to  
determine this. Is that OK?

I would also like to mark the one way streets with their direction,  
but so far, I don't know how to do this.

I also fixed the junction of 5th avenue and Broadway at 24th street. I  
got it to the point where it looks good but I am not sure the streets  
nodes connect properly. How can I tell if two points that overlap are  
joined together properly?

I have deleted two small streets that do not exist, but I had a hard  
time figuring out how to do it. I am using the Potlatch editor. If I  
select a line segment an hit delete nothing happens. So what I have  
been doing is adding a point in the center of the segment I want to  
delete, then splitting the segment at that point, then selecting the  
end points at the split and then deleting. This seems to work but I  
doubt if it is the recommended method.

I also would like to redraw the West Side highway as a double lane  
divided highway with proper connections to the city streets but, being  
such a newbie, I hesitate to make such a major change. Is it ok if I  
work on the highway in my neighborhood and leave the uptown part of  
the highway for someone else?

Any advice would be appreciated.

-Joe Lertola