For months I’ve been mapping addresses in Cheltenham, England. I recently discovered the JOSM “Coloured Streets” style. It has improved my address mapping and might help you too.

The style shows streets and all the buildings and address nodes “on” them in the same colour. This makes it easy to spot buildings tagged with the wrong addr:street at a glance. It also clearly shows buildings with addr:housenumber or addr:housename (you must enable the latter in the settings) but no addr:street. (The JOSM validator checks for this too, but with Coloured Streets you can see the problem immediately.)

In this example, Ashcombe House, Outwoods, and Beechwood are in pink and therefore have an addr:street of Stanley Road, when they should be on Ashley Road. The mistake would not be obvious otherwise.

If you look near the bottom right of this screenshot, you can see Windsor Street shown in orange:

Going north, the street becomes Cleevemount Close–but something is wrong: buildings continue in orange (meaning they have an addr:street of Windsor Street) alongside Cleevemount Close, which is purple. The house numbers on this section of the street are consistent with the numbers on Windsor Street. The street alongside 58-68 is probably still Windsor Street, not Cleevemount Close. I double checked on the ground, and the street is indeed Windsor Street. I’ve fixed the problem.

Coloured Streets makes problems like these more obvious.

You can activate the style in JOSM by:

1. Selecting the “View” menu.
2. Selecting “Map Paint Styles”.
3. Selecting “Map Paint Preferences”.
4. Selecting “Coloured Streets” in the “Available styles” list and pressing the arrow to add it to “Active styles”.

As with any other JOSM style, it’s easy to toggle on and off, or to temporarily hide by switching to wireframe mode if the colours become overwhelming or distracting.