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I'm trying to find a safe route to bike to a location, and Google Maps suggests that I take a major highway to do so. So I'm trying to route out a safer trip manually, but knowing the speed limits of each road would help out tremendously.

Google seems to have this data available, because when you use Google Maps for driving navigation it will display the speed limit on-screen. I would like to be able to overlay these speed limits onto every road in view when I'm viewing the map (as opposed to having to drive down those roads to figure it out, in which case I could just look at the signs myself.)

Strictly speaking, I don't actually need the speed limits overlaid on the map: a list of all the roads in view with their corresponding speed limits is also perfectly fine with me.

So far, my only solution is to use Google Street View and move down the roads until I find a speed limit sign, but this is a very time consuming process and doesn't work well for long routes.

I did manage to find that I can overlay the speed limits onto each road with OpenStreetBrowser, as well as have a list of the roads with their speed limits at the side, but unfortunately it does not know the speed limit for a large number of roads, unlike in my experience, Google Maps, which seems to nearly always know the speed limit for any road I'm on.

Is there any way I can achieve this functionality with Google Maps? I'm also happy to use Apple Maps (either on iOS or Mac), Bing Maps, or really any other site that could effectively achieve this purpose.

I haven't found any option in the settings on the official website, but it does look like it could be achieved with the Google Maps Roads API. Has anyone set up a public site that can do this? Or would I need to create it myself?

Unfortunately trying to search for something like this just gets me tons of results of how to display the speed limit on-screen for navigation.

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  • did you ever figure this out?
    – Mason
    Jun 5 at 16:03
  • @Mason Nope, I haven't. If I later do or create a solution myself I'll add it as an answer.
    – johnfernow
    Jun 6 at 17:41
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    I know, technically it is feasible. In The Netherlands we have a bicycle route planner (routeplanner.fietsersbond.nl) and the editor for the map supports showing maximum speed as a colour, just like the traffic layer in Google Maps. But with this route planner your problem would already have been solved, since it is created especially for bicycle routes. Unfortunately this routeplanner only covers The Netherlands.
    – ffonz
    Nov 13 at 15:23

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