In the project I was thinking about, some project members also got a little ahead of the others, and contracted a route planner company to create a special planner and special maps for publicity and end users. The project members, the company and the mappers together created all this, including the OSM mapping - and then the city decided not to fund the actual signage and road upgrade operation, but keep the route planner as is. If it were up to me I would correct the mapping (in this case, simply make the relation type=network rather than type=route).
One can argue that this network doesn’t really exist on the ground; on the other hand, OSM registers many unvisible details as secundary attributes, and one can argue that membership of a (online verifiable) particular virtual network is a secondary attribute of these ways.