Ugh, yeah, this is a bummer. It’s talked about elsewhere in the forum, but I don’t have time to search right now - basically OSM doesn’t know what a “street” is in the way that we do. It only knows about “ways” which are sections of a street - might be the whole thing, might just be a curve, etc.
In order to cobble together the idea of a street, I have to match up the individual ways somehow. I’m using the name field to do this, which causes this issue of multiple same-named streets in one city being packed together as one street record.
There are some approaches that might help avoid this, but nothing is perfect. Like, collecting all the ways where the nodes are “close” to each other - for various definitions of “close” - will sometimes mistakenly separate streets … or the definition of close will be too near, and it’ll still pack different streets together.
