The roads you cannot ride — and what the way round costs

Spanish law shuts a bicycle out of every autopista and autovía, and then requires any authority that extends the ban onto the hard shoulder to signpost an alternative route. It never says what that alternative costs. On this island it is five roads, and the surprise is which one hurts.

This page measures the detour rather than describing it. The rule it follows from — and the six others that bind a rider here, five of which change this October — is on the rules page.

Closed to bicycles

138.9 km

Across 5 corridors, measured along one carriageway of each.

Costs you most

Ma-1 · +8.6 km

15.8 km of closed road; the legal way round is 24.5 km and climbs 138 m more.

Costs you least

Ma-20 · −0.6 km

The way round is the shorter road — 11.3 km against 11.9 km.

Against the Consell’s own total

180 m apart

On the one road where the road authority’s catalogue and our measurement cover the same tarmac.

What the way round costs

For each closed road: its own length along one carriageway, and the shortest road a bicycle may legally ride between the same two ends. Both lines sampled on the same terrain model, so the climbing is comparable and not just the distance.

The ban is nearly free on the long roads and expensive on a short one. The Ma-20 is the island’s ring road and its alternative is −0.6 km — the streets go through Palma, the ring goes round it. The Ma-1 costs more than any of the others over far less road — 15.8 km closed, +8.6 km to get round it and 138 m of extra climbing — because the autopista tunnels straight through the headlands west of Palma and the old road goes over every one of them. If you are riding out of Palma towards Andratx, that is the hour nobody plans for. It is also the only alternative here that climbs like a ride rather than a transfer: 340 m in 24.5 km, along the coast. Plan for it rather than resenting it.

Which roads, and how we know

There is no public dataset of “roads a bicycle may not ride”. Building one means reading a map for evidence, and three things in OpenStreetMap look like they should answer the question.

They disagree, and the disagreement is worth knowing before trusting any of them. The map classes 920 ways as motorway. Its “bicycle=no” tag — the one that ought to record the sign at the slip road — fires on only 54 of them, and on none at all of the autopista de Ponent or the Via de Cintura, two roads nobody has ever disputed. Take that tag at face value and you would publish that the autopista out of Palma is open to you. So the closed set here is the highway class, stated as what it is: a mapping convention that happens to track the legal one, not the legal one itself.

The names are the third signal and they contradict each other on a single road: the Palma–Inca autopista is named «Autopista» on its carriageways and «Autovía» on its own slip road. That is not sloppiness worth correcting — it is the first sign that the distinction is not a property of the road at all.

How we got this Three tags counted independently over the same set of ways: the highway class, the “bicycle” access tag, and whether the way’s own name contains “autopista” or “autovia”. They are reported separately rather than combined, because what they do is disagree.Computed from every way OpenStreetMap classes motorway or trunk inside the island bounding box.Computed 6 August 2026.

The hard shoulder question

The ban on the carriageway is the same on an autopista and an autovía. The shoulder is where they part company, and it is the one question a rider might actually want to answer at a slip road.

Riders over 14 may use the hard shoulder of an autovía — but not of an autopista — unless road safety reasons close it by sign, in which case the sign must be accompanied by a panel giving an alternative route. That last clause is the reason this page exists: the law assumes the alternative is known.

So which of these five is which? The statute answers that itself, and the answer is not in any dataset. Both categories are defined as a road «especially designed, built and signposted as such» — the classification is constituted by the signs, so the sign at the slip road is not a fallback when the data runs out. It is the test.

Autopista — no access at all for adjoining properties, and reserved for motor vehicles.

Carretera especialmente proyectada, construida y señalizada como tal para la exclusiva circulación de automóviles…No tener acceso a la misma las propiedades colindantes.

Autovía — the same grade separation, but access for adjoining properties is limited rather than absent.

Carretera especialmente proyectada, construida y señalizada como tal que tiene las siguientes características:…Tener acceso limitado a ella las propiedades colindantes.

Vía para automóviles — a third category, shut to bicycles by the S-3 sign rather than by Art. 38.

Vía reservada exclusivamente a la circulación de automóviles…señalizada con las señales S-3 y S-4

Practically: ride none of them. The shoulder of a road carrying 100 km/h traffic past a tunnel mouth is a bad place to be right whatever the sign says, and every one of the alternatives below is a better ride than the road it replaces.

The fifth road

The Palma–Manacor road is the longest closed corridor on this island — 46.1 km — if it is one. The map does not class it as a motorway, so nothing mechanical catches it; what puts it on this page is its own name, «Autovia Palma - Manacor», carried on the road the 2006 rebuild produced.

The evidence for it being shut is a signing decision rather than a statute: the concessionaire is reported to have put up S-3 signs — the sign that makes a road a “vía para automóviles” — sending cyclists, pedestrians and small mopeds onto the service road that runs beside it. That service road is the alternative, and it is why the measured detour below is modest for such a long corridor.

Treat it as closed and use the service road: +7.9 km over 46.1 km is a cheap price for not finding out. It is also, for most of its length, a duller ride than anything in the Tramuntana — the Pla is flat, fast and exposed, and this is a road to cross rather than to follow.

Checking the map against the road authority

Every figure above comes from one map, which is one source. The Consell de Mallorca publishes its own summary of the network it owns — four high-capacity roads, 94.6 km — and our four motorway corridors, measured a completely different way, come to 92.8 km. 1.8 km apart, 2% of the total, and neither number was derived from the other.

One road makes the comparison exact. Three of the four are the fast section of a longer numbered road, so the authority’s entry covers tarmac our figure deliberately leaves out. The Via de Cintura is high-capacity end to end: the Consell’s own catalogue lists it at 12.1 km and we measure 11.9 km — 180 m apart on a road twelve kilometres long.

What that agreement does not establish is which roads are legally shut. It establishes that the lengths are right. Those are different claims and only the second one is measured here.

How we got this The Consell counts four high-capacity roads and gives their total length. Ours are the four the map classes “motorway”, each measured as the shortest path along its own carriageway between its two ends. Two independent routes to the same number: one an administrative register, one a measurement over a public map.Computed from the four corridors OpenStreetMap classes as motorway, against the Consell de Mallorca’s own count of its high-capacity roads.Computed 6 August 2026.

Landing at Palma with a bike

The eix de llevant runs from the airport into Palma and you may not ride a metre of it. The legal way in adds little — it is the flattest alternative on the list — but with a bike box and a day’s travel behind you, the usual answer is a transfer. Book a transfer with a bike and start riding tomorrow.

Or hire on the island

Every alternative on this page is a road-bike route, and several of them climb more than the road they replace. If you are hiring rather than flying a bike out, get the gearing right first: compare hire bikes on Mallorca.

Where to base yourself

The Ma-1 detour is the one that costs an hour, and it is the one you pay every day if you base yourself west of Palma. Base yourself where the riding starts instead — stays in Sóller.

How these numbers were made

Two road graphs are built from the same map extract. The first keeps only the closed roads and gives each corridor its own length, along one carriageway between its two furthest-apart points. The second removes every closed way and answers the rider’s question: the shortest road you may legally use between those same two ends. Both lines are then sampled every 20 metres on the national 5-metre terrain model and smoothed before any climbing is counted. Shortest by distance, not by time — no router here knows about traffic lights.

Sources

Source Real Decreto Legislativo 6/2015, de 30 de octubre, texto refundido de la Ley sobre Tráfico, Circulación de Vehículos a Motor y Seguridad Vial — Anexo I. Conceptos básicos · checked 7 August 2026

Source Consell de Mallorca · checked 6 August 2026«Mallorca está formada por un total de 205 carreteras las cuales suman 1.578,28 km. La mayoría de carreteras que encontramos en la isla son convencionales, 201, que suman un total de 1.483,68 km. Además, contamos con 4 vías de alta capacidad 94,6 km».

Source Consell de Mallorca — Pla Director Sectorial de Carreteres (Illa de Mallorca) · checked 6 August 2026The annex classifies every road by its place in the network — primary basic, primary complementary, secondary — and not by whether it is an autopista or an autovía, which is why the category that governs the hard shoulder is not settled here.«Classificació per tipus d’us de cada carretera de la xarxa», novembre 2009

Source Mallorca Press · checked 6 August 2026Reported 7 February 2019: the concessionaire installed S-3 signs so that those road users take the service road beside the carriageway instead. A press report of a signing decision, not the decision itself.«peatones, ciclistas, jinetes a caballo o ciclomotores de cilindrada inferior a 50 cc»

How this site measures things

Back to the rules a cyclist meets here

What riding one of them costs, if you are stopped