City's Total Street Count Changing Dramatically

My city’s total street count in February was 11,402 streets. I have a screenshot from CityStrides to show it. Now it shows 11897. Was there an error somewhere, a change in how streets are calculated, or is there a log of what changes in each OSM update? A change of nearly 500 streets is a whole lot.

If you activate notifications for a city you get a mail every time that city is updated, detailing new and deleted streets. Not sure if there’s any way to see the changes afterwards if you haven’t activated notifications. @JamesChevalier any ideas? Which city BTW?

The city in question: Charlotte, North Carolina.

Going by its Openstreetmap history it recently annexed new territory (or rather: the new territory recently got mapped).

That eastern part is just not shown in the boundary on CS yet at all. That might be the recently added area. I don’t remember exactly, but I think in CS the showing of the boundary is not in sync with the streets getting fetched.

Edit: Yup that seems to be it, take for example this street that is part of the new boundary and now also in CS. Just the CS representation of the boundary is outdated now. @JamesChevalier I believe that requires a manual update from you?

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Thank you very much. This is helpful and makes sense. Charlotte has a history of annexation (how it got so big in general).

I was unaware of a history function in OSM. Is there a way to see a map of what changed in an OSM update or see a list of what changed in an OSM update?

Every object in OSM has a view history at the bottom of its overview. Changes are grouped together in changesets which also have overview pages. There’s also some tools out there that make the object history a bit more presentable. I think there might be a tool that shows all changes in a certain area, but I don’t have it bookmarked + that would be a lot more info than what you’d be interested in I think. OSM updates happen constantly whenever any user edits something (well, saves their edits). If you mean an overview of what changed since the last city update: don’t think so, I just was lucky that the Charlotte history mentioned annexation and that I could spot the boundary difference.

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