Online, I saw that the street “Palmer St” connected to “Alvarez Common.” In JOSM, they are clearly separate. A bit later, I refresh the page, and they’re no longer connected. But if you look at the satellite imagery in Google Maps, you can see that the street is very nearly connected. There’s a wall along the north side of Alvarez Common, with an opening for Palmer St, but there is a welded metal gate and landscaping preventing access.
How do I properly depict this in JOSM? It seems that if the node at the end of Palmer St is too close to Alvarez Common, the server will render it as connected.
Also, Vida Larga Loop renders on the server as just the street name, with no rendering of the actual street. What did I do wrong?
You’ve forgotten to add a “highway” tag – perhaps highway=residential. Without highway tag it is just an invisible line on earth like the city borders of some town.
(Not your fault. OSM is misleading. Mathematical line sequences are called “way” without meaning that you can go or ride on them and even nearly invisible footpaths are called “highway”.)
The renderers do have problems showing this correctly and some of the problems may be unsolvable…
For JOSM, it’s rather simple. If the end point of a street is not part of the other street, then they are not connected – not even if the point were exactly on the line. An alternative may be to enter the streets as connected, but with a barrier in between.