Speed limits

Feature page: Speed limits

Description

Defining speed limits on roads, railways and waterways.

Tags

Speed limits on roads, railway and waterways can do tagged together with the position of speed limits signs and infrastructure for enforcing speed limits.

Contents 1 Maximum and minimum speed limits 2 Speed limit signs 3 Enforcement 4 County code/zone conversion table 5 Gallery 6 Tools 6.1 Josm 7 See also

Maximum and minimum speed limits

Maximum and minimum speed limits are tagged using maxspeed=* and minspeed=* on the way defining the section of road/railway/waterway. The value in both cases can either be a numeric value, which should have a ' mph' or ' knots' suffix for places where the speed limit is specified non-SI units; for places where the speed limit is measured in kilometers per hour no suffix is needed. As an alternative the maxspeed value can consist of a textual value of the form '<county-code>:<zone>' using one of the entries from the table below (for example 'IT:urban' or 'DE:motorway'). Use uppercased codes from the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard.

The source:maxspeed=* tag is used to contain information about the form of the limit when the limit is provided as a numeric. Values include 'sign' where the speed limit is specified as a numeric value, or using the <county-code>:<zone> format where this is being used.

Speed limit signs

The position of the actual speed limit signs can be added as nodes beside the road/railway/waterway. This should be tagged with traffic_sign=maxspeed (or traffic_sign=minspeed as appropriate) and information about the speed limit itself, for example maxspeed=50 for a speed limit sign displaying 50 km/h.

Signs that cancel current speed limits (hence setting the default limit) should be mapped as

• traffic_sign=maxspeed
• maxspeed=default

Please note that this is mostly a way to keep track of speedlimits and to ease verification. The highway (or railway/waterway) itself must be tagged with maxspeed=* as well.

Enforcement

For fixed speed cameras use the highway=speed_camera as a node at the location of the camera. Where speed limits are enforced using average speed cameras use Relation:enforcement or tag the way with maxspeed:enforcement=* or alternatively enforcement:maxspeed=*.

County code/zone conversion table

Examples include:

value	numeric equivalent
DE:motorway
DE:rural	100
DE:urban	50
IT:urban
RO:motorway	130
RO:rural	90
RO:trunk	100
RO:urban	50
RU:rural	90
RU:urban	60
GB:motorway	70 mph
GB:nsl_dual	70 mph
GB:nsl_single	60 mph

Gallery

	Speed limit sign with a numeric speed limit. Picture from Wikimedia Commons, taken by User:Abbamains, licensed cc-by-sa 3.0
	Sign showing different speed limits during the day and at night. Picture from Wikimedia Commons, taken by Daniel Schwen, licensed cc-by-sa 3.0
	Speed limits specified using marking on the road. Picture from Wikimedia Commons, taken by User:DF08, licensed public domain

Tools

Josm

If you add the custom mappaint style (Preferences -> Map Settings -> Map Paint Styles) Speedlimit Signs to your JOSM configuration, correct maxspeed sign icons will be displayed on the nodes for each speed limit tagged with the recommendation above (tagging signs).Note: this is currently only working with no units tagged, feel free to improve this.'

See also

• Proposed features/trafficzone‎ (for implicit laws and restrictions)
• minspeed=*
• zone:traffic=*
• zone:maxspeed=*
• access=*
• OSM tags for routing/Maxspeed
• Default A proposal for a default values system. This proposal can set default maxspeeds for areas (countries, states...)