I'm wondering what to do with a road that has been removed (demolished and replaced with grass) but is still on the satellite images that show up in OSM. I'm worried people are going to replace it and I'll have to "police" the area until the sat. images go away.

I just deleted the motorway_link (I believe) from the northeast of the intersection detailed in the Location for this post, since it is now gone and the old left turning/straight through lane has been replaced with a dumb no-right-turn-on-red triple-lane setup.

Any tips? Was I supposed to leave the old road and mark it with some sort of 'gone' tag that I missed while reading up on how to do this editing?

Incidentally, I signed up for OSM 3 years ago and thought it was a great idea but didn't get into it because my GPS setup was clunky (laptop + USB receiver) and the editing software was terrible. Now that JOSM and Potlatch have evolved considerably and my cell phone can record GPX files, I'm starting to get interested again - at the moment, mostly just repairing screwed up maps in areas I'm familiar with, but I can imagine going on some mapping outings just for fun.