Looking for advice to use josm to update an attribute for many objects

In my city all of the main streets have an asphalt surface and are lit with street lights.

I’m trying to learn how to use josm more effectively.
what I would like to do is I would like to load up all of the streets in my city but not all of the points and not all of the buildings not all of the parks Etc. Is there a way for me to load only Street data in Josm?

Once I have it loaded is like to visually verify on the map that I’m looking at the right streets (not paths not driveways, not streets I don’t recognize.

Then for those streets perhaps a set of 50 I would like to set the attribute to lit because there are street lights and set the attribute to Asphalt because they will all be paved with asphalt.

I’d like to learn how to edit in Dawson without having to open the attributes panel for every single way separately which seems very slow and tedious.

I appreciate your advice or any links you can offer that point me to tutorial so I can learn to use josm better. Somebody had mentioned using a task list and importing into the task list to do something like that.
I’m not sure if this would provide a mass update or if that would require a singular edit on every object again.

Thanks in advance for your help
Gmckone

In JOSM you can select lots of roads and change or add a tag in one go. Just make sure that your selection is correct.

Also on JOSM you can copy to clipboard strings below:

surface=asphalt
lit=yes

Next you can select one or more roads (pressing Shift button) and paste to them tags with Ctrl+V key combination.

You have two available strategies here: Downloading only the streets, or downloading everything but using the search function to select only the streets.

To achieve the former, you can select the “Download from Overpass API” tab when downloading data and enter a suitable query. (The “query wizard” could be helpful for you.)

To achieve the latter, you can use JOSM’s search function. You can also search within an existing selection, so you can use the select tool to select a rectangle, or an arbitrary region that you draw with your mouse, and then select “find in selection” from the search menu.

The choice it’s partially a matter of taste and what you’re familiar with. Some of these features might require you to have enabled JOSM’s “expert mode” first, not sure.

Once you have your initial selection, you can look at each of the streets to make sure you haven’t accidentally selected anything streets that aren’t lit or covered in asphalt, or where you don’t know for sure. You can use Ctrl + left click to add or remove streets from your selection. (This inspection step is important, as you would be performing an automated edit otherwise. The community has special rules for these because they can very easily go wrong.)

As per the other responses, you can then easily edit all selected objects at once.