How do I delete a duplicate (but reversed) way?

I enterred some coastline using PotLatch, and then had to reverse the order of it so that the sea wasn’t the land, etc (using JOSM).

Probably because the OSM server was being a bit cranky at the time, there are now 2 ways, and 2 sets of segments, in a couple of places in the data.

if you take a look here (Christchurch Estuary, New Zealand) http://www.openstreetmap.org/edit.html?lat=-43.53352955969494&lon=172.739884665532&zoom=12

and select the way that makes up the northern part of the estuary (when I try I get way# 4801684, but there are 2 so you might hit the other one), you can see what I mean.

If you open this location in JOSM instead (paste the above URL into the ‘bounding box’ dialog), and turn on ‘show direction of segments’, you will see that the ways around this estuary have all segments going in both directions - i.e. duplicated. How can I remove the wrong-direction way and segments, leaving the correct data in place? I find it almost impossible to select the bad way in JOSM, and when I did, and deleted it, all the bad segments were still there (just the ‘way’ was deleted), so I didn’t upload my changes. If I select in PotLatch I cannot tell if I have the good or bad way selected, and I haven’t figured how to delete complete ways there yet either.

Can anyone please help me sort out this mess? Don’t hack the data unless you know what you’re doing because I don’t want to have to digitise it all again! There are more duplicates further south from here too (Lyttleton Harbour) I think.

Many thanks.

-Ken

Best method is to select the bad way (or the good one, that doesn’t matter really) using: middle click (this shows all ways under the cursor), hold ctrl-key and select the way (left click). Now move that way using the ‘move’ function out to an area where there are no other ways near. Then select the entire way, including nodes using the select area tool and delete.

Excellent - many thanks. After much messing round I have figured out how to select and move the offending ways - all is now fixed and I’m just waiting for t@h to complete the rendering.

The nack is this:

  1. select the ‘move’ tool first.
  2. middle-click-and-hold to see the list of things under the mouse
  3. press & hold ctrl - move mouse - left click way details - wait for way to be selected (turn white) - click-and-hold mouse on details again - release ctrl - then drag the way to new location.
  4. snip and repair any other ways who’s segments got damaged because they connected to nodes that have moved
  5. finally delete the offending rubbish.

A fair bit of control-shift-elbow-foot-click-headbutt-thump in all of that, but I finally have it sorted.
http://www.informationfreeway.org/?lat=-43.57&lon=172.73&user=kmf&zoom=12&layers=0B00F00
Cheers!
-Ken