The derestricted Autobahn, checked against today's traffic reports

How much of the Autobahn has no speed limit?

Most of it. About 73 percent of the German Autobahn network carries no permanent speed limit (BASt, 2025). The rest is signed, and nearly ten percent of the network runs under electronic signs hung above the carriageway, which raise and drop the limit as traffic and weather change. Freibahn maps the permanently derestricted part: the stretches where the end-of-restrictions sign applies and no fixed limit follows.

What does the round sign with the diagonal stripes mean?

That is Zeichen 282 of the German road traffic code (StVO): end of all imposed restrictions. Past it, no specific speed limit applies. It is the sign this site takes its logo from, and the closest thing the derestricted Autobahn has to an emblem.

Does no limit mean drive as fast as you want?

Not quite. The advisory speed (Richtgeschwindigkeit) of 130 km/h applies everywhere. Above it, German courts can assign partial liability after an accident even when the other driver caused it. And whatever is signed on the road, including a limit shown on an overhead electronic sign, always outranks any map.

What does "clear" mean on the map?

Clear means nothing is reported for that stretch: no roadworks, no closure, no traffic jam, no warning in the official feed. It does not mean the road is empty. Queues grow and shrink between official reports, and traffic can form faster than the fifteen-minute refresh.

A stretch shown clear can also run under electronic signs hung above the carriageway, which can show a limit that no public data source knows about. Freibahn marks those stretches with a variable limit note and the distance it covers, but what the signs show right now is not published anywhere. Ordinary roadside signs can do the same. A limit posted for work beside the road or for a damaged surface stays up until someone takes it down. The tarmac can be finished before the 80 sign has gone home. It reaches this map only if a mapper records it in OpenStreetMap or the work itself is reported in the feed. Neither is guaranteed, so a stretch shown clear can be signed at 80 with no roadworks in sight.

Where does the data come from?

The derestricted geometry comes from OpenStreetMap, every carriageway recorded there as having no speed limit, mostly the explicit maxspeed=none tag, collected in advance and updated a few times a year. Roadworks, closures, traffic jams and warnings come from the public API of Autobahn GmbH, the federal motorway operator, and refresh every fifteen minutes while the map is open. Two roads with derestricted stretches (B33 and B59) are not covered by that API at all. Their stretches stay grey on the map and off the list. Rain and low-visibility notes come from Open-Meteo, which runs the German weather service's own forecast model, sampled on a grid of roughly 55 kilometres and checked every half hour. A note means rain or low visibility is reported somewhere on that stretch. No note does not mean the road is dry, the grid is too coarse for that promise.

The typical-traffic notes are built the same way as the geometry, in advance rather than live. They come from a full year of hourly counts at the federal counting stations run by the Bundesanstalt für Straßen- und Verkehrswesen (BASt, 2025 data), matched to the carriageway each stretch describes, so a note means that hour of the week is usually heavy on that stretch and not that anything is happening right now. Roughly one stretch in seven has no counting station within two kilometres and carries no note at all, which is why the absence of one says nothing about how empty a road will be. Freibahn never names a quiet hour: an average from last year is a poor basis for deciding when to drive fast.

What Freibahn is for

It is a planning tool: a way to see where a long clear derestricted stretch is before you set out, not a substitute for reading the road. No account, no cookies, no ads.