I'm a new mapper; I've been wanting to do this for a long time but not had the intestinal fortitude to actually start mapping and uploading. I live in Osaka, Japan. This is very gratifying in a way since I seem to be about the only one here mapping the city so I have lots of low-hanging fruit to pick. Seen another way, however, it's kind of scary and discouraging; the whole urban area is over 9 million people so I could spend the rest of my life mapping streets in this place.

Also, with very few people doing any mapping I don't have many examples to draw on for local features. My main problem right now are the big roads (the ones a step below motorways). While they are at the same level as the local streets, they are multi-lane, heavily trafficked and either one-way or two-way but divided by a sometimes quite prominent middle division. They are in other words really wide roads. One example - the one I have trouble with right now - is Nagahori street. Here's a (not that illustrative) picture of it: [http://farm1.static.flickr.com/115/299290678_d095b317db_b.jpg Nagahori Street]

I don't have a car or even a driver's license so there is basically no way for me to actually make traces down the middle of these roads. Those traces would have some issues anyhow since the roads can be very wide (the other road I need to start on - Sakaisuji - is five lanes wide) so the width really matters. In the case of Nagahori street, there's even a bus parking going down the middle of part of the street. 'm considering simply tracing the sidewalks and running the roads right in between, perhaps augmented with markers I put down at the center as I cross the roads on zebra crossings.

A related issue with Nagahori street and others is that the sidewalks are wide - as wide as a one-lane road - and separated from the car lanes by trees, bushes and so on. I don't know if I should map them as separate roads by itself or if I should just figure their width into the main road itself?