Land Use = Retail contains a lot of non-retail area and roads and other things that don't belong

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1

There is a big “landuse=retail” area where I do a lot of mapping and it’s causing me a lot of frustrations when I want to improve an area that shares nodes along its ways. There is a lot of vacant land contained within this “retail” area. I am tempted to just delete the whole land_use=retail and draw smaller individual areas around the retail businesses. But the wiki has all sorts of admonishments against deleting nodes or ways. I am not experienced enough with editing to trust my judgement, so asking here first.

The area in question. I’m proposing that I would delete the whole area, then draw a new land_use=retail around the Citgo gas station and its pumps, and also the tractor dealer across the street. Opinions?

2

There are no other properties on the object so there should not be a complex problem when changing its shape to better reflect actual landuse. I would probably start cutting it in 3 parts and exclude the main roads. Then you can continue cut away more pieces where landuse is different.

3

There are two options when you’re slicing up large, incorrect landuse:

  1. Use JOSM, which has editor tools to do this properly by drawing a “cut line” and using the cut tool to split the landuse area.
  2. Delete the wrong landuse first, then redraw each section - works in every editor

My understanding of the community consensus is that deletion is basically always acceptable if you’re committed to working on it promptly.

4

I don’t quite understand why you want to split up the landuse. If I view that polygon with aerial images in the background to me the whole area seems to be landuse=retail. All I would change is “unglue” the polygon from the highway-way.

5

I wouldn’t call that one “big”, but it crosses major highways and covers quite heterogenous businesses.

OSM usually works on an “iterative refinement” principle: someone first draws rough outlines of the area, and later on other mappers add more detail, which may include splitting large areas into finer-grained ones.

We encourage keeping the history of elements, but that’s just a “good practice” guideline, not a command. Landuse areas are rather abstract and mapper-defined concepts to begin with, so I don’t see much value in keeping their history at all cost. When I encounter such situations (typically, when the outline was drawn very crudely) sometimes I do edit them, and sometimes it’s much more practical to kill them and start anew.