No worries, it was a straightforward fix and thanks for the detailed and understanding reply! And its great that you are helping map! I'm a VT alum myself (BA Geography, BS Meteorology '17) exclusively biking everywhere when I was there. Lately I've been mapping bicycle and pedestrian infra around Blacksburg, including a lot of what you and the other BikeStreets.com mapper (your dad?) were working on (including the ways in this changeset), and while I don't always split at every node, it is helpful to split at least by block as well as longer ways at logical breaks.

I really appreciate the additional context; that's really helpful in understanding the situation better. I also talked with the user atticquilt (maybe your dad?) on their changset #170357437 https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/170357437 who was also mapping for BikeStreets.com but that gives me some additional context to that discussion. 

> The splits are if I want the low stress map to go a certain direction that the current length of the segment doesn’t allow for.

Right, I figured this was because your renderer/router didn't properly support automatically splitting ways at intersections. NB, I discuss this in more detail on the changeset linked above, but in general there is no expectation that OSM ways are split at every intersection unless there is a reason for them to be (e.g. tags, length, relation membership, etc) and the the great majority of them aren't; other data consumers that need it handle this sort of mechanical pre-processing themselves.

Personally, I'm a lot more intentional than most when it comes to splitting ways, doing so at significant intersections and logical points and re-grouping ways consistently, so I find a lot of your changes generally helpful. On the other hand, splitting ways too finely at every single small intersection (especially on things like crossings) can make them more tedious to edit and easier to make mistakes, as well as making the history harder to navigate, without a direct benefit to OSM (since data consumers that need it already handle this properly). For this reason, I've suggested he post on the OSM community forum explaining what you all are doing and why to gather feedback and either get community buy-in for splitting on every single intersection, or collaborate on potential alternatives.

FYI, you and your dad are welcome to join the OSM-US Slack https://openstreetmap.us/get-involved/slack/ if you haven't already, the main hub for the US mapping community—great for asking questions and soliciting community feedback. We recently created a #local-nrv channel for discussion of mapping in the local area. Anyway, happy mapping, good luck with your studies and GO HOKIES!