Abstract Traffic speed prediction is known as an important but challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel model, called LC-RNN, to achieve more accurate traffic speed prediction than existing solutions. It takes advantage of both RNN and CNN models by a rational integration of them, so as to learn more meaningful time-series patterns that can adapt to the traffic dynamics of surrounding areas. Furthermore, since traffic evolution is restricted by the underlying road network, a network embedded convolution structure is proposed to capture topology aware features. The fusion with other information, including periodicity and context factors, is also considered to further improve accuracy. Extensive experiments on two real datasets demonstrate that our proposed LC-RNN outperforms seven well-known existing methods.