build (third-person singular simple present builds, present participle building, simple past and past participle built)

“Rome wasn’t built in a day”.

Built.

On a family vacation in Idaho when I was a kid, we were exploring some forest-service roads west of Palisades Reservoir in the family minivan. (Guidebooks recommend ATVs for that road...) At one point we were delayed about 45 minutes due to a herd of sheep blocking the road.

We did have a GPS on board, but road-nav models hadn't hit the market yet; this was meant for maritime navigation. I think Dad might have saved a couple of waypoints on that trip, for whatever reason...

Complete!

Coastlines are messy for complex stuff like this anyway. Better to use waterway=riverbank on a series of not-too-huge closed ways or multipolygons.

@ orienteer:

I think I've heard of a way to download just a specific subset of data (perhaps using the xapi) but I don't know if that functionality is built into JOSM. In this case, I started by downloading data for a very small portion of Lake Erie that I knew contained some nodes that were part of existing county boundaries. In that way, I got a couple of the county boundaries downloaded. Since all the objects I was interested in were connected to each other (the ways may have been overlapping, but at least they shared nodes) but to very little other data, I repeatedly selected some nodes, and hit ctrl+alt+D (Download Referrers) to retrieve other ways that use those nodes, until I got all the old USGS boundaries. Some of these were also connected to boundary ways (and relations) that had already been manipulated in Potlatch. Once I got part of one of those, I just told JOSM to download the rest of the relation for that county. Finally, since I intended to merge these with the TIGER-imported Ohio boundary, I told JOSM to download every member of Ohio's boundary relation, selected all those members, then invoked the Download Referrers command again so that JOSM would be aware of other relations using those ways, such as Kentucky and Canada. That way, if I split those ways, the other relevant boundary relations could be updated accordingly.

So yeah, like I said earlier, it's tricky. But in some cases, it's doable. It helps when a relation refers to most of the data you want; I and other contributors have made large-scale adjustments to roads that way.

@ JohnSmith:

Yes, I've heard about JOSM's filtering feature. I don't think it would have been very helpful on this task, however, unless I was willing to download the entire state of Ohio. (I was not.) But I do look forward to trying it out in the future.