The speed a driver must drop to when they overtake you

From 1 October 2026, the driver coming up behind you outside a village has to do something specific and new: come down 20 km/h under the limit on that road before they pull out, and stay there until they are past. Which is a subtraction with a term missing, because nobody publishes what the limit on that road is. So we measured it.

Every figure below is the limit on a stretch of tarmac minus the number the article states. The rule itself, and the six others that bind a rider here, are on the rules page.

The reduction

20 km/h

below the posted limit, Art. 85.4, from 1 October 2026

On the Ma-10

40 km/h

the Serra road is 60 km/h over 92% of the 102.9 km whose limit is on record

On Sa Calobra

70 km/h

the map records 90 km/h on the Ma-2141 — the highest limit of any climbing road here

Roads measured

139

469.6 km of 1,135.4 km with a limit on record

Road by road

Art. 85.4 of the Reglamento General de Circulación, in the wording that takes effect on 1 October 2026, adds one sentence to what a driver overtaking a cyclist already has to do. It is the only one of the seven changes arriving that October that puts a number on the car rather than on the rider.

The sentence, in the redaction that carries it:

si el adelantamiento se efectúa fuera de poblado, antes de iniciar la maniobra, y durante toda su ejecución, el conductor que adelanta deberá reducir la velocidad respecto al límite existente en la vía en al menos 20 km/h, a fin de garantizar que los usuarios adelantados no vean comprometida su estabilidad y seguridad.

The BOE’s own note on where that wording comes from: Se modifica el apartado 4, con efectos de 1 de octubre de 2026, por el art. único.12 del Real Decreto 518/2026, de 24 de junio. Ref. BOE-A-2026-13889

The Ma-10 is the row that matters, because it is the road. 128.3 km of measured climbing runs along it — more than any other road on the island — and it carries 60 km/h over 92% of the length whose limit is on record. So from October the car behind you on the Serra road is legally required to be doing 40 km/h while it goes past. That is about the speed you are climbing the Puig Major at, doubled.

Climb by climb

A road’s limit changes along it, and the Ma-10 runs the length of the Serra — so its island-wide profile says nothing about the two kilometres above Sóller. These 20 figures are read only from the ways inside each climb’s own box, and each is checked against the metres this site had already measured on that road before it is printed.

The spread across the table is the whole argument: Coll d'Honor from Bunyola obliges a driver down to 20 km/h, and Coll dels Reis from Sa Calobra — a road nobody would call fast — leaves them 70 km/h.

20 of 122 measured climb-sides get a figure, and the other 102 account for themselves — 46 not pinnable to their own stretch closely enough to print, 25 on roads where too little of the limit is on record, 22 withheld by the atlas for its own reasons, 8 spending their metres on lanes with no road number at all, 1 on a number that also covers a stretch shut to bicycles, and 0 with a limit at or below the reduction itself. The buckets total the corpus exactly, or the list does not publish — which is the only way a list like this is worth reading.

Why it protects you least where the road is worst

The reduction is relative. 20 km/h off ninety is seventy; 20 km/h off sixty is forty. The rule therefore does its most where the traffic is already slowest, and its least where it is fastest — and on this island that runs backwards against the terrain.

Across the cycling network the fastest band that governs a real length of road is 90 km/h over 214.5 km, which leaves an overtaking car at 70 km/h; the slowest is 30 km/h over 6.9 km, which puts it at 10 km/h. Same sentence, same manoeuvre, 60 km/h apart.

Sa Calobra is where that lands hardest. Twenty-six numbered hairpins, a road cut into the side of a gorge with no sightline longer than the next bend — and the limit on record is 90 km/h, the highest of any climbing road here, so the new duty leaves a car overtaking you at 70 km/h. The Serra road, which is wider, straighter and busier, gets you forty.

The bottom of the table is where a relative rule with no floor gets strange. Thirty minus 20 km/h is ten, which is slower than the rider being overtaken; twenty minus 20 km/h is nothing at all, and a duty to overtake at zero cannot be what the sentence means. The article sets no floor and no published guidance supplies one, so the bands at or below the reduction get no figure here — 0.2 km of the network, and on inspection village streets the map’s built-up land does not cover, which makes them as much a limit of that proxy as a gap in the rule. No road’s own limit falls that low.

None of which makes the rule bad. A relative reduction is enforceable in a way an absolute one is not — an officer with a radar and a road sign can prove it — and forty on the Ma-10 is a real change to how the Serra feels in March. But if you want to know where the sentence will change your ride and where it will not, the table above is the answer and it is not the one the headline suggests.

Where the duty stops

The sentence attaches «fuera de poblado» — outside a built-up area. Inside one it simply does not apply, and the reason that boundary cannot be drawn on any map is the statute’s own definition of it:

Poblado — Anexo I §70, Ley de Tráfico

Espacio que comprende edificios y en cuyas vías de entrada y de salida están colocadas, respectivamente, las señales de entrada a poblado y de salida de poblado.

Travesía — Anexo I §71

Tramo de carretera que discurre por poblado.

A space bounded by its own entry and exit signs is not a shape in a dataset. It is the same construction the same annex uses for the autopista, and it has the same consequence: the category is made by the signing, so no map holds it. What is measured here instead is the map’s built-up land — 100.9 km of these roads run through it, against 1,135.4 km that do not. That split is ours, it stands in for the legal one, and every figure on this page rests on it.

In practice the difference is smaller than it sounds: on this island the numbered roads mostly pass villages rather than enter them, and where one becomes a village street it is a travesía and the signs are unmistakable from the saddle. The place to be careful is the edge — the two hundred metres after a salida de poblado sign, where the duty switches on and the driver behind you has no reason to have noticed.

What the map does not know

Of 1,135.4 km of open road, OpenStreetMap records a limit on 469.6 km — 41%. The rest carries no maxspeed tag at all.

The obvious repair is to fill the gap with the statutory default, and it is not available. Art. 48 sets the limits outside a poblado and Art. 50 sets them inside one, so which default applies depends on the boundary this page has just finished explaining nobody can draw. A blank stays blank.

And a recorded limit is not the same thing as a sign. Of the 469.6 km on record, 64.0 km is a mapper noting an actual plate at the roadside and 149.2 km is a mapper noting the statutory default for that class of road. The remainder says neither.

Which is worth holding onto when you read the Sa Calobra row: none of its recorded kilometres says whether that 90 km/h is a number on a post or the default for a conventional road. The duty subtracts from whichever it turns out to be.

The checks

The reduction is relative, so a reform that moved the limits would move every figure here. Both redactions of Art. 48 and Art. 50 were compared word by word: the urban limits do not change at the changeover at all, and the only edit to the outside-poblado article replaces máxima en vías convencionales → máxima, cualquiera que sea el tipo de vía fuera de poblado, — which is about buses whose passengers are standing. Every figure on this page survives October intact.

Against the road authority’s own register: the Consell de Mallorca counts 205 roads totalling 1,578.3 km; this measured 238 distinct road numbers over 1,853.7 km, or 117% of their figure. The gap is structural rather than an error: a dualled road is two mapped centrelines and one road in a register, and every slip road inherits its parent’s number. It is printed rather than reconciled, because reconciling it would mean deciding which centrelines are really the road, and that decision has no source.

Each climb’s stretch is checked against the metres this site’s climb engine independently recorded on that same road, and refused when they differ by more than 45%. 46 were refused. A localised figure that cannot be shown to be about this climb is worth less than no figure.

How we got this The Consell counts its roads and gives their total length. This counts distinct references and the length of every centreline carrying one, which is a different quantity by construction — both carriageways of a dualled road, and the slip roads that inherit its number, are lengths here and not roads there. The two are printed side by side so the size of that gap is visible rather than assumed away.Computed from every mapped way carrying a Ma- reference, against the Consell de Mallorca’s own register of the network it owns.Computed 7 August 2026.

Riding the Ma-10

The Serra road is the one you came for and the one this rule changes most. If you are not bringing a bike, hire is booked ahead here and delivered to most of the base towns — compare hire shops and models.

Where to base yourself for it

Sóller sits halfway along the Ma-10 with the Puig Major on one side and the Coll on the other, which is why it is the base that makes the fewest compromises for anyone riding the Serra — find a place to stay in Sóller.

If the overtake goes wrong

Travel policies routinely exclude cycling as a sport, and the ones that cover it often stop at organised events. Worth reading before you need it; EKTA covers cycling as standard. We do not compare or rank insurers — we link one and tell you what to check.

How these numbers were made

One statute, one map, one script. The reduction is parsed out of the article rather than typed beside it, so a further amendment stops the page instead of ageing quietly inside it. Every limit is a length-weighted measurement over the road’s own geometry, not a count of map objects: a road that is sixty for forty kilometres and forty through one village is sixty, and the village is a separate number.

Sources

Source Real Decreto 1428/2003, de 21 de noviembre, Reglamento General de Circulación — Art. 85.4 · checked 7 August 2026

Source Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado · 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».

How we got this Road geometry, speed limits and built-up land are read from OpenStreetMap on the date given, by one query each, with no cached answers — a cached extract would let a stored date certify a read that did not happen.Computed from © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.Computed 7 August 2026.

How this site is researched and verified

Back to the rules for cyclists on Mallorca

What a bad overtake costs the driver

The roads you may not ride at all