How do you find and close open areas that you been working works best?
I use Safari to edit in the in-browser editor. I worked north of downtown Pittsburgh on bus routes and managed to relearn how to pull areas that do not relate to roadways (mainly residential areas and natural wood) back. However, I managed to create openings in several. Besides deleting and beginning again (again), what suggestions do you have to find and make these closed areas? I keep OpenStreetMap set to show all Issues except Fix Me requests. Each area is a multipolygon of the correct type against at least one other area but typically more than two. I know how to create the relations with a multipolygon if needed. I do not usually create areas that are this large but have worked with neighborhoods of this size in the past. However, I live in Arkansas but am trying to fix mistakes that I made. I do work on the Pittsburgh Regional Transit system. That is how I managed my way to this area. I also took a vacation to Pittsburgh during August 2024. I try to learn the areas before I go in OSM. Any suggestion will be appreciated. I guess this is on the Pittsburgh Regional Transit PRT 7 Spring Garden and 4 Troy Hill routes after it heads north along Spring Garden Road or Mount Troy Road. I do not appear to be making much progress. Please do not reset my progress or lack of progress. I know how to do that.
There are several QA Tools for offline data validation. For multipolygon validations, I use OSM Inspector, which shows quite a number of warnings in the entire northeastern US. There are a dozen invalid multipolygons in Pittsburgh, although I didn’t check if they are due to your edits.
You run into these problems because the roads in this area are being re-used as border lines in the administrative boundaries. As far as I know, this is considered bad practice and causes a lot of issues. As you already have noticed. If the administrative area’s are disconnected from the roads (and rivers etc.), you wouldn’t have to worry about areas when working on bus routes.
Having said this, I don’t have an easy solution for your problems. Even if the local community would agree on disconnecting the boundaries from the roads, this would be a lot of work.
As long as the boundaries are connected to the roads, you might consider to check the boundaries before you start working on the bus lines. If a boundary area is closed before you start working on the bus lines, but broken afterwards, you know that it caused by your editing. In the past, the online editor was notorious for for breaking relations. I don’t if this is still the case. Personally, I don’t use it, because I consider Josm much easier to use.
I use a MacBook Pro and have never used Josm. What I found from the first suggestion appeared (Josm/etc) to be a suggestion for computers that run MS Windows. Since mine doesn’t, that left me with mapping using the in-browser editor. I have been removing areas from roadways. I do not map that way since it causes problems.