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In this paper we provide bound estimates for the two fastest wave speeds emerging from the solution of the Riemann problem for three well-known hyperbolic systems, namely the Euler equations of gas dynamics, the shallow water equations and the blood flow equations for arteries. Several approaches are presented, all being direct, that is non-iterative. The resulting bounds range from crude but simple estimates to accurate but sophisticated estimates that make limited use of information from the solution of the Riemann problem. Through a carefully chosen suite of test problems we asses our wave speed estimates against exact solutions and against previously proposed wave speed estimates. The results confirm that the derived theoretical bounds are actually so, from below and above, for minimal and maximal wave speeds respectively. The results also show that popular previously proposed estimates do not bound the true wave speeds in general. Applications in mind, but not pursued here, include (i) reliable implementation of the Courant condition to determine a stable time step in all explicit methods for hyperbolic equations; (ii) use in local time stepping algorithms and (iii) construction of HLL-type numerical fluxes for hyperbolic equations.