Beautiful tool. The area I have mapped had a number of little glitches that I would probably never have found. Highly recommended.

The data is so much more than just a road map. Tag the driveways as tracks, or service or invent a tag to mark them, but don't delete them if they are in the right place.

You can map the physical with highway=track or highway=service etc. Then add an access tag to denote its use such as access=private. You can be more precise with motorcar=yes|no, etc. It's in the wiki map features, though it isn't always easy to find or interpret.

I've been wondering about this too. When I walked around a couple of local roads to check out their addresses the GPS tracks clearly showed up both footpaths at the side of the road, including where the path meandered away from the road briefly. It is a lot of work to cover a large village, never mind a town or city.

Last year I mapped a public footpath that runs over the roof of a warehouse in one of the docks in Hull (UK) via steps at both ends.

In some cases a row of shops might actually be just one building. Add the building as an area tagged building=yes then add a node for each shop. Some (most?) shop types do not render on the Mapnik or Osmarender layers.

Beware of OS maps. We tend to trust them in the UK, but they are made by people too, and those people can make mistakes. There is an area close to me that the OS mark as Swanland Dale - there's no such place and there never has been, except that the local council's definitive maps are based on OS maps so suddenly it becomes a real place. You can always put a note against the way for the river explaining your choice of name.

If you set the location someone might be able to help or give advice.

Welcome - I hope you enjoy mapping as much as I do.

There is a second layer that gets rendered much more often called Osmarender. You can change to that layer using the blue and white + sign at the top right. The Wiki gives more information.

HC, Chris

If you tried to walk through a school playground in the UK you would first need to get past the security fence and then risk being arrested - especially you happen to have a camera with you.

The street you added (Kaiserswerther Strasse) has been rendered on the Osmarender layer. You can get to this layer using the the Blue and White + on the top right of the screen.

BTW, welcome and happy mapping.

It could be that the utility company added phantom roads to help monitor their copyright - as you say leaking their data. This addition of imaginary stuff is common, but usually simple small changes that don't affect the usefulness of the map. These are sometimes known as copyright easter eggs.

I'm not sure highway=raceway will render on the main maps as they stand.

I find mapping with a GPS on the ground much easier than tracing a Yahoo image, but that's why we need different ways for different people. Bingo hall: no idea.

If the crown no longer owns the company, crown copyright will not apply to new maps. rather a more normal, 65-year copyright. If they become a private company I doubt they will move their primary asset ("their" data) to PD.

If you enjoy mapping power lines then this is a good enough reason to do it. They are practical too - when I navigate by conventional (non-GPS) means, power lines are excellent landmarks. They are shown on UK OS maps for this reason.

Rural coverage in the UK does vary, but is improving. It seems to help to create a Wiki page for an area - I created one for East Yorkshire which is a large rural county. The list of villages and towns came from Wikipedia which has proved fairly accurate and gives a target to aim at and a list for people to check if they are thinking of going somewhere. Many of the rural roads were mapped by people taking an alternate route to a normal destination. That said it will take a determined effort to cover every part of the county - and probably some petrol too.

I would expect a compass to be accurate to a single degree in most circumstances. They can be affected by iron nearby. If my compass was even a few degrees out I couldn't safely use it to navigate across moorland in a fog, which I have done may times. Using a consumer GPS as a starting reference point for surveying introduces a lot of error when mapping a small space like a piazza.

You have drawn the river with waterway=riverbank to draw the boundary of the river, which is fine. You could draw a line down the river between the banks tagged with waterway=river and add the name tag to that way. As well as making the name follow the path of the river, it allows you to indicate the direction of the flow by the direction of the way.

Have you looked at openlayers?