How is taxi speed measured? What is the maximum taxi speed and who defines it? has a lot of interesting thoughts and facts about what maximum taxi speed is admissible or practical. It brings me to this new question: how does a pilot know how fast he/she is going when on the ground, apart from just looking out the window?

Afaik most planes only have an airspeed indicator, which I suppose is not of much use while taxiing due to surface winds being in the same order of magnitude as ground speed. Also I wonder if an ASI has any usable accuracy near the bottom of its range. The same might be true of GPS speed indication.



Did some more research and found out GPS is much more accurate than I thought it was. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15519597 and other sources find it better than 0.5 ms-1 most of the time. I guess that is better than what can be calculated from wheel speed, especially with big, fast wearing tyres.
Some aircraft have a "taxi speed indicator". Here's one I found on ebay for an Airbus: