Editing maps just for yourself

Hello everyone, I am new here and recently a major road scheme opened near me (the A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon scheme) and it was meant to be opened as a motorway and given the number A14(M). However things did not work out and it never happened. I was editing the map and put the whole scheme under motorway regulations but if I saved it t would change the main map, therefore making it incorrect. In future I would also like to add other motorway schemes which would have happened but never did. So is the way I can edit the map without making the changes I make occur on the main map?

Not sure what you mean by “it never happened”. . . They built it but decided it wasn’t A14(M). Or they started building it but abandoned the project. Or it was proposed but never built.

In any case, maybe the life cycle prefix tagging scheme could be of use here. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Lifecycle_prefix

That would, for example, allow you to may the location of failed scheme as something like:

proposed:highway=primary

To the best of my knowledge, the life cycle tagging is not rendered on https://www.openstreetmap.org/ so it won’t clutter up the map for others. But specialized renderers may show it.

What I meant was Highways England had planned for it to be a motorway but in order to open it early they scrapped the plans for it to become a motorway. It is now a ‘best in class A road’ I could give that a try and see what it looks like.

Using something like umap https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/ you could draw changes over the top of an OSM map (and not saved to OSM).