Average Speed Cameras in Europe: How Section Control Works

An average speed camera measures how long you took to get from one camera to the next, whatever speed you showed as you passed it. That one design choice changes driver behaviour over kilometres of road instead of a few hundred metres, and it is why section control is now mapped in more than half of the European countries we checked.

It also makes the systems hard to see on a map. A section is two points and the road between them, so a camera database that stores dots undercounts it, and national authorities publish their lists in very different formats, if at all.

We counted average speed sections three ways: in OpenStreetMap, in our own camera index, and in the official lists of six countries that publish one. OpenStreetMap held 1,813 average speed objects worldwide on 29 September 2026, and 1,699 of them (94%) are in Europe. This article explains how the systems work, where they are, and how far each source can be trusted.

How average speed cameras work

A section control system has three parts: a camera at the entry point, a camera at the exit point, and software in between.

1. Entry. A camera reads the number plate of every vehicle and stores it with a timestamp.
2. Exit. A second camera, a known distance further on, does the same.
3. Matching. Software pairs the two reads of each plate, divides the distance by the elapsed time, and keeps only the vehicles whose average speed was above the limit.

Spain's traffic authority describes its radares de tramo in the same terms: artificial vision cameras at both ends, a computer that matches equal plates, checks the passage times and computes the average speed. The DGT has run them since 2010 on motorways and on ordinary roads.

The arithmetic is simple, which is part of the appeal. Take a 5 km section with a 110 km/h limit. The shortest legal time through it is 5 ÷ 110 hours, or 2 minutes 44 seconds. A car that takes 2 minutes 30 seconds averaged 120 km/h, whatever speed it showed at either camera. Braking hard in front of the exit camera changes the result by a few seconds at most.

Authorities subtract a measurement tolerance before issuing a fine. In the Netherlands the public prosecution service states the correction as 3 km/h for limits up to 100 km/h and 3% of the measured speed above that.

Because every vehicle's plate is read, section control is also a form of automatic number plate recognition. The same hardware family is covered in our article on ALPR and Flock cameras in OpenStreetMap. What happens to the reads of drivers who kept to the limit is set by national law.

Where the sections are, according to OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap maps an average speed section as a relation of type=enforcement with enforcement=average_speed. The relation holds the camera points and the road between them, so one relation normally equals one section in one direction. Taginfo's chronology shows how young this mapping is: 30 objects at the end of 2019, 826 at the end of 2023, 1,411 at the end of 2025 and 1,813 on 28 September 2026.

Counted per country with Geofabrik's taginfo on 28 September 2026, next to the average speed points in our camera index:

24 of the 45 European extracts contain at least one average speed object. Sweden, Finland, Greece, Hungary and Romania contain none. The United Kingdom is the odd one out in how it is mapped: 84 of its 166 objects are camera points or ways rather than section relations.

The two columns measure different things, so compare them with care:

• OpenStreetMap counts sections, mostly one relation per direction, drawn by volunteers from signs and official announcements.
• The camera index counts camera points reported by drivers of the MapMetrics app. A section has at least two, and a multi-lane gantry can produce more.

Where the index is far ahead, as in the United Kingdom (787 points against 166 objects) and Belgium (498 against 197), drivers have reported more camera sites than mappers have drawn sections. Where OpenStreetMap is ahead, as in Spain and Poland, mappers have been thorough. The same pattern appears for fixed speed cameras in our traffic enforcement camera dataset. The whole index is browsable in the camera index and the speed camera map.

Of the 1,554 relations inside a Europe bounding box, 1,242 (80%) carry the enforced maxspeed, and only 201 (13%) have a name. The most common limits are 50 km/h (321 sections), 90 km/h (234) and 80 km/h (188), so section control is as much a tool for towns and main roads as for motorways.

Checked against official lists

Six countries publish something we could compare against. The units differ, so the table states each one.

What each comparison shows:

• Italy is the largest network and the most under-mapped. The Tutor covers 204 sections and about 1,987 km, 178 of them on the Autostrade per l'Italia network. OpenStreetMap has 66. The Polizia di Stato cites a ministerial decree of 13 June 2017 (no. 282) and a decree of 10 June 2026 (prot. no. 125) as the rules for checking the equipment.
• Spain's gap runs the other way. The DGT's machine-readable inventory lists 47 average speed sections and 690 fixed radar cabins on the roads it manages. Their end points are a median 2.6 km apart in a straight line, and the longest pair is 32 km apart. OpenStreetMap holds 294 relations, 71 of them in Catalonia, which runs its own traffic service and is not in the DGT list. Sections run by cities, and relations drawn per direction, may explain more of the difference. We did not reconcile the lists one by one.
• France stopped building them. All 66 average speed radars in the ministry's list entered service between 2012 and 2018, most of them in 2013 and 2014. They are 2% of the 3,309 fixed radars on the list.
• The Netherlands maps each direction. The prosecution service lists 11 motorway and 20 regional road locations, each enforced in both directions. 31 two-way locations make 62 directional sections, against 80 relations in OpenStreetMap, so the open map probably holds some sections that are no longer on the list. We did not check which.
• Austria's official list is short. The ministry names the Kaisermühlentunnel on the A22 in Vienna, set by an ordinance of 2007 (BGBl. II Nr. 168/2007), and two stretches of the A2. OpenStreetMap maps 10 sections.
• Germany has one confirmed section. Lower Saxony's police law allows it, and the state's higher administrative court found no serious constitutional objection in November 2019. Only one of the 16 German relations in OpenStreetMap carries that description. The other 15 have no name, and we could not match them to a published section, so treat them as unverified.

The lesson is the same one we found for low emission zones: open map data tracks what is visible and new well, and it keeps what has been switched off. Official lists track legal status, and they rarely say what was removed.

Query the sections yourself

Paste this into overpass-turbo.eu and replace NL with any two-letter country code:

[out:json][timeout:90];
area["ISO3166-1"="NL"][admin_level=2]->.country;
rel["type"="enforcement"]["enforcement"="average_speed"](area.country);
out geom;

The result draws each section with its cameras and the road between them, and exports to GeoJSON. To count instead of draw, replace the last line with out count;. Keep to one country per query, because the public Overpass servers are shared.

To check the arithmetic for a section you drive, measure the distance between the two gantries with the distance calculator and divide by the limit.

Method and limits

• OpenStreetMap per country: objects tagged enforcement=average_speed in each Geofabrik country extract, from Geofabrik's taginfo, data until 28 September 2026. Extracts include a small border buffer, so a section near a border can count in two countries. Worldwide total and chronology from taginfo.openstreetmap.org.
• Tags inside Europe: one Overpass query for every average speed relation in the box 34°N to 72°N and 25°W to 45°E, run on 29 September 2026.
• Camera index: average speed points per country in the MapAtlas Camera Index, snapshot 21 May 2024, aggregate counts only. 3,270 points are assigned to a country.
• Official lists: fetched on 29 September 2026. The Spanish and French figures are counted from the published files, and the Italian, Dutch, Austrian and German ones are taken from the pages linked in the table.
• What the numbers do not measure: whether a mapped section is switched on today, how often it enforces, or how many fines it produces. Temporary sections, such as those at roadworks, move and are rarely mapped.