I saw a road that was a bit of a mess, so I tried to clean it up. There were 2 paths overlapping, so I performed a few cuts to a way to cut the duplicate overlapping stuff, so now, 'The Castings' is split into 3 parts.

Merging the center part of 'The Castings' creates a zig-zag road which is worse.

osm.org/browse/way/119081551

It seems that the merge feature is trying to merge the ways toe to toe, or head to head, rather than head to toe.

osm.org/edit?lat=49.266718&lon=-123.130941&zoom=19