Speeding on British roads continues to be a pressing concern for all. Vehicular speeding is associated with poorer road safety and reduced walkability, making our streets worse places to be. While everyone wants to get somewhere quickly, unsafe speeding can not be the solution.

In many cases, speeding is not simply the non-adherence to road laws. Characteristics of the built environment – the urban make up, road design, etc. - may have a significant effect on driving behaviour. This can in turn make speeding more or less likely to occur. In some cases, where the speed limit does not match the perception of the users, the environment may create dangerous environments.

Understanding where speeding is taking place is an important step in improving the design of our city environments. But until recently, we had lacking large-scale data collection that had enabled its variation across space.

On this site, we present speeding behaviour data collected from goods vehicles (LGVs and HGVs) in UK cities, across a month in October 2023. This data was collected by Compass IoT, and made available to the Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service for research purposes. All data is non-identifiable and aggregated, and no personal data is collected as part of this project.

The Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service is part of the Smart Data Research UK family of data services.

This study uses anonymised vehicle GPS trajectory data supplied by Compass IoT, collected over the whole month in October 2023 across the United Kingdom. The dataset includes over 3.2 million vehicles’ trips recorded by 794,127 vehicles. Each trip entries captured detailed vector data including, coordinate, speed, timestamp, and acceleration. These data are available on request for research purposes through the Healthy and Sustainable Places data portal:

Road link data is available here

LSOA level data is available here

Each GPS point is associated with a corresponding timestamp and speed. No data on individual drivers or vehicles are collected. This study only uses data on trips undertaken by light goods vehicles (LGV) and heavy goods vehicles (HGV) that are integrated with the connected car system, and thus not fully representative of all vehicle journeys.

For the purposes of assessing speeding, we compute a measure of speed at the road-link level. This process involves matching GPS points to road links and computing an average speed. To ensure a representative sample, we only keep road links with a minimum of 25 GPS points (those falling below this threshold are shown in grey). As road segments can be quite short, small gaps may appear along roads where segments do not meet this threshold.

As the base layers we use the Ordnance Survey Mastermap Highways network (under the Ordnance Survey Educational User Licence), with additional road-level data provided by Basemap. These data are not available for download. For the regional maps, we have used Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOA) census areas. Average adherence measures are calculated for all roads within each LSOA area. LSOA basemaps data are available here.

Further detail about the methods used in this study can be found in the following preprint paper: Geographic determinants of vehicular speeding in British cities.

This website aims to provide more information about the relationship between urban design and speeding by vehicles across 13 British city regions.

This project is led by the Healthy and Sustainable Places (HASP) Data Service and is part of our mission to make smart data available to help researchers better understand and improve the health and sustainability of places. HASP is a part of Smart Data Research UK, the UK's national programme for smart data research.

The research is led by Professor Ed Manley, University of Leeds, with analysis carried out by Dr Long Chen and Hilman Prakoso. Additional thanks to Maeve Murphy Quinlan, Dr Fran Pontin, and Ollie Clark.

Further acknowledgments to our funder, the Smart Data Research UK at the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and data partners, Compass IoT.

This dashboard DOI:

https://doi.org/10.82147/012

Data License Acknowledgement

© Crown copyright and database rights 2024 Ordnance Survey (AC0000851941)

Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.

This work uses speed limits data provided under licence by Basemap Ltd