Hello,
Mapping of motorways, trunk, primary and secondary roads is fairly
consistent in Switzerland.
But mapping of unclassified, residential, track and service roads is less so.
So I'll explain how I map (Canton Geneva and nearby France).
Comments welcome!
highway=residential: road not meant for transit, and deserving houses.
That's most roads in villages and low densities suburbs. Residential
roads are often access=destination. They can even be privately owned,
as long as it is not apparent (it has a name, is deserved by the
postman...); otherwise I use highway=service (see below).
highway=unclassified: road that is not residential nor tertiary, but
usable for transit. Sometimes it is difficult to tell between
residential and unclassified. Generally, I use residential on roads
where pedestrian may look at you with suspicion of you drive a car. ;)
highway=track: like unclassified, but so minor that it is not usable
for transit, and should never be used for routing, except to reach
endpoints. Generally tracks are used to deserve farmland and forest.
Generally snow is not removed from tracks. I almost never use
highway=track if it deserves an inhabited house.
tracktype=grade1: paved track
tracktype=grade2: unpaved track, without grass
tracktype=grade3: unpaved track, with grass in the middle
tracktype=grade4: unpaved track, with lot of grass
tracktype=grade5: unpaved track, 100% grass (very difficult to see on
aerial pictures)
highway=service: Generally, if a road as a name, I don't tag it as
service. Most of the time serice roads are inside a single property,
with access=private or access=customers.
service=driveway: for the private road to a single building (or a few building);
service=parking_aisle: for roads inside, or deserving, a parking lot
service=alley: very uncommon (in Switzerland)
bare service: quite uncommon, for short visibly private residential
roads, emergency access to motorways, major roads in big properties
(like factories).
I tag privately owned roads with access=destination if it is not
apparent that they are private (ie if you need the land registry to
know that the road is private).
I think that the main differences between my tagging method and other
methods used in Switzerland are that:
- I don't use highway=service for paved tracks;
- I don't use highway=service for minor residential roads.
- I use highway=residential a lot.
- I never used the access=permissive tag.
I wish you a happy year 2015 of mapping
Marc Mongenet