Couldn't agree more. Increased road capacity leads to flatter, more spread out cities 10 years later which in turn increase the demand for road capacity.

If, instead, residential areas are focused around transport hubs, 10% of its citizens may go for public transport or simply end up living closer to work.

For the individual, after all, the cost of commute is measured in minutes traveled , not in miles traveled.

It would normally take anywhere between 2-20 minutes before you see any changes in the main map. Even longer depending on your browser cache settings.

One way to speed up viewing the result render is to, after sumitting your edit, open up a single .png-tile which covers your changes, add "/dirty" to the URL and hit reload after 5-6 seconds.

In Chrome, simply right-click --> Open image in new tab, then go URL in new tab and add "/dirty". Example: http://c.tile.openstreetmap.org/16/34723/19063.png/dirty
This works well for zoom levels 16-18 and also for lower levels, albeit a little slower.

Same here - I've also edited OSM through Potlatch 2-4 hours every month for the last 3 years and I've never experienced any reverts or deletion apart from during the massive license change last summer.
Much of my home town was deleted by the redaction bot as it went through cleaning up non-compliant data. In many cases this included data which was originally created by user who never approved the new licensing terms, even if the road had been subsequently modified or edited by a compliant user.

Did your edits disappear around summer 2012 or has this happened on other occasions too?

Errata: The redesigned Myriad-based licence plates were finally made mandatory in Nov 2006 after a 2.5-year delay. All vehicles bought or re-licenced after this date are issued with the new design. http://www.typografi.org/bilskilt/dk54019_myr.jpg . Casually looking out at the nearest 15-space parking lot 6 years later shows a ~80% adoption rate of the new style licence plate :). 2002-style plate is on remaining 2 of the cars and pre-2002 style on 1 car.

This has been "tested" around 2002 in Norway. A car registration plate font redesign was conducted to make all plates issued from that moment look more modern and stylish and a font similar to Eurostile were implemented. All in the name of creating a mono-space font which would make all plates equal width. ("IL 111111" would be just as wide as "MW 123456")
Result: Numbers 3, 6, 8 and 9 went from being easily distinguishable at 80m+ to be undreadable by speed and toll cameras. You could pass speed cameras with little risk of getting fined and drive on any toll road for free. Sombody else would end up with the bill due to the misreading of the license plates.

Scroll down to see examples here:
http://www.typografi.org/bilskilt/bilskilt.html

In 2004 they decided to go for Myriad with variable white-spacing instead. This has not yet been implemented :)

This has sometimes been my experience too. I've been with Linux Mint the last 4 years at home, doing pretty much the same set of typical home PC tasks: Reading the paper, youtube, fb, gmail, banking, watching movies, managing photos, home videos the kid's homework etc. After doing it for 2 years, I felt I'd been through whatever Linux Mint could throw at me and I actually started recommending it to a few friends, touting it as a no-cost alternative that would be worth trying. Even the local kindergarten needed 2-3 better (and cheap) PC-system for the next 2-3 years for their occasional office computing needs. They were really impressed. Then it dawned on me. The people I know who are now on LM: 1. Are more willing (and expecting) to be able to pay for better applications can now maybe get 10% of their wishes granted that way. 2. Are willing to and expecting to call someone and give them $50 to fix stuff. (They can only call me as there are no other Linux guys) The point is that the money is there for you, it's just very hard (practically) for people to spend it. Take donations for instance: This is money that you give to the developer *after* you have downloaded and used some application. Only a small fraction of people even remembers to do this. In many cases you can only donate to some foundation and then only hope that this goes towards developing that one feature you need.