[OSM-newbies] Working on Manhattan

[Christoph Eckert]

Hi Joe,

welcome to openstreetmap:

> 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

That's the usual way osm addicts people ;-) .

> 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?

Sure. More or less our current tags (primary, seconday etc.) express the 
importance felt by the mapper rather the "official" classification.

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

Add a tag oneway and mark it as yes or true.

> 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?

As Jeremy explained, just move a node around and see if both streets follow. 
Then do an undo to undo the move.

> 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'm not familiar to Potlatch, but JOSM (the osm offline Java editor) lets you 
split a way at an arbitrary node. Then you can use the key "d" to delete 
segments.

> 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?

osm is learning by doing. Of course you need to learn step by step, but OTOH 
you should not hesitate to much. Anyone here once did the first steps.

The US recently got imported from TIGER data and need a lot of fixing and 
maintenance. You'll surely do some mistakes every now and then, but as long 
as your success to mistake ratio is greater than, uhm, at least one :) it's 
surely worth the effort.

Hope you enjoy osm,

ce