@compdude mapnik generally renders within 5 minutes, unless there was a previous tile rendering within a specified time limit, you can force it, but generally most of the time the browser is caching tiles, not the server.

@aude there is already a generic icon for a fast food place (a burger) and while not perfectly matching all fast foods is good enough to know there is something there at least.

@lyx you can get some non-smart phones that have GPS built in and use a j2me app to record your track, or instead of a fully fledged GPS device you can get cheaper USB/bluetooth devices that can talk to laptops/netbooks or phones that can handle the GPS information and record it.

I had the same issue, I merged the duplicates and now all is well again in the land of maps...

I can only assume you are talking about potlatch, there are other editors, the top 3 used the most by number of edits is JOSM, Potlatch and Merkaartor, but there are many others, some are specalised to a specific function, others are more general:

osm.wiki/Editors

I think highway=ford on nodes has rendered for a while, but ways don't render, while ford=yes on road sections won't render either in the long term this is more likely to be rendered.

It sounds like there is no hi-res imagery available in your area. You will probably need to find other ways to collect data like GPS tracking, or other sources of imagery.

What about mobile phones with GPS functionality?

The tiles may be cached still, to help reduce load or your browser may be caching them to prevent wasting bandwidth, what street(s) ?

OSM is about a database of map information, how that renders is another matter entirely.

@Tordanik footway describes a specific thing, a concrete foot path, it doesn't describe width or anything else any more than path does, which is why those other tags exist for, so if it isn't concrete use a surface=dirt tag etc etc etc.

Hope you are wearing your flame resistant underwear...

Some people, notably in Europe outside the UK pushed to have highway=path replace highway=footway completely, but in the voting the bit where footway was made redundant wasn't accepted by the majority of voters, but this hasn't stopped some pushing the agenda anyway.

In general footway's are concrete paths in built up urban areas, paths are bush tracks.

Hope you are wearing your flame resistant underwear...

Some people, notably in Europe outside the UK pushed to have highway=path replace highway=footway completely, but in the voting the bit where footway was made redundant wasn't accepted by the majority of voters, but this hasn't stopped some pushing the agenda anyway.

In general footway's are concrete paths in built up urban areas, paths are bush tracks.

Just ride the road a dozen times or so and average the path based on all the tracks.

I don't know of any existing maps that highlight walking paths for pedestrians, if you do want to create one using mapnik you will need to tweak the mapnik style sheet, the current OSM tile style is in the OSM svn server, but opencyclemap doesn't publish it's style sheet, if you want more information about this feel free to email me.

There is lots of rural areas that Nearmap covers that aren't currently mapped, especially lesser roads between towns, but it takes almost as much effort to find areas that need mapping as it does to map them.

There is one they put in Gympie I kept meaning to photograph and tag when I was still in Gympie but I kept forgetting to do it.

The other benefit of JOSM is it now has a filter function to make admin boundaries, or any other object for that matter, unclickable or completely hidden, or you can do inverse filtering to only show one type of object.

There is plenty of unmapped roads in Australia if people want some "rare" opportunities :P

We even have some hi-res aerial imagery that has lots of unmapped roads in rural areas so you don't even need to leave the comfort of your own home for this once in a life time experience :D

@emj And "streets" are the only things mapped in Open Street Map?