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Interactive map of average vehicle speeds across Great Britain. Use the sidebar controls to filter by local authority, vehicle type, and minimum speed. Hover over a road or area to see its speed statistics in the sidebar.

Average Vehicle Speeds


Maximum adherence

Brighter shades indicate lower adherence to speed limits.

0

50

100

Hover over map to see road-level data below

Adherence:

%

Average speed:

mph

Observations:

points

Trips:

trips

Zoom out to see variation across city regions

The underlying datasets are available here.


Speed distribution for the hovered or selected feature.

INTRODUCTION

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 cars, buses, and light and heavy commercial vehicles (LCVs and HCVs) across Great Britain, during October 2024. 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. Use the vehicle dropdown in the sidebar to switch between vehicle classes.

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

METHODS

This study uses anonymised vehicle GPS trajectory data supplied by Compass IoT, collected over the whole month in October 2024 across the United Kingdom. Each trip entry 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:

The underlying 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 uses data on trips undertaken by cars, buses, light commercial vehicles (LCV) and heavy commercial vehicles (HCV) that are integrated with the connected car system, and thus not fully representative of all vehicle journeys. Use the vehicle filter to view a specific class.

For each road link we compute summary statistics — average speed and several percentiles — across all GPS observations matched to that link in the month. To avoid showing unreliable averages, road links with fewer than 10 observations are excluded from the maps. Short road segments and low-traffic links may therefore appear as small gaps. The same statistics are then aggregated upward to area level (see below).

For the regional maps, we use Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) for England and Wales, and the equivalent Data Zones for Scotland. Count-weighted mean speeds are computed for all road links whose representative point falls within each area. Boundary files are from the ONS Open Geography Portal: LSOAs and Data Zones. At the coarsest zoom we display the same statistics aggregated to Local Authority Districts (LADs).

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.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This website aims to provide more information about the relationship between urban design and speeding by vehicles across Great Britain.

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, Hilman Prakoso, and Dr Agnibha Banerjee. Additional thanks to Dr 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

Office for National Statistics geographies licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Scottish Government Data Zones (2011) used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

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