OpenStreetMap doesn’t have a concept of “streets”, it only has Way records which are sections of roads. A street may be composed of one or more Way records. I have to piece these Way together within CityStrides to produce the full Street. I do that by matching them on their name.
If a city has two streets with the same name, CityStrides joins them as one street.
I’m working on a fix for this, which revolves around splitting streets wherever the underlying Way records no longer share a Node ID. When several Way records actually form a street, the data will be along the lines of Way A having Nodes 1,2,3 and Way B having Nodes 3,4,5 - it’s that shared Node 3 along with the same name tag that identifies itself as a single street.
In my local testing I’ve noticed a number of OSM edits need to be made afterwards - and this is in my smaller 300-500 street cities. Overall, these have been good edits that improve the map … but it still is editing work, and will likely confuse some people along the way.
The most common edit I’ve seen so far is that small connecting Way records around a roundabout need to have a name added (example & example).
Another common way that streets get split up is when they’re weirdly disjointed, like this section & this section … In the updated code, those will exist as two separate Arlington Street records in CityStrides.
Conversation around this fix I’m working on should go into Count every street in a city when 2 or more share the same name - #7 by JamesChevalier