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