County Maps US

Tools Distance, area and drive time

Distance Between Two Places

Enter two places and get the great-circle distance between them, the initial bearing, and the line itself on the map.

How to use it

  1. Type the first place: an address, city, ZIP code or "lat, lng" pair. Use my location works too.
  2. Type the second place.
  3. Press Measure. The distance appears in miles, kilometres, nautical miles, metres and feet, with the bearing.
  4. Share the page link; it contains both points.

How it works

The distance is the great-circle (haversine) distance between the two coordinates on a sphere of mean radius 6,371.0088 km, computed in the browser. Against the WGS84 ellipsoid this is within about 0.3 percent, which for 1,000 miles means at most three miles.

Places are found through the Photon geocoder on OpenStreetMap data. A city resolves to its centre point, so a city-to-city figure is centre to centre. The bearing is the initial great-circle heading, clockwise from true north.

Questions

Is this the driving distance?
No, it is the straight line "as the crow flies". Roads add 15 to 40 percent on land. The crow-flies tool on this site shows both side by side.
Why do the initial and final bearings differ?
A great circle is the shortest path on a globe and its compass heading changes along the way, except due north or south or along the equator. The initial bearing is the heading when you set off; the final bearing is the heading on arrival.
Can I enter coordinates instead of addresses?
Yes. Type them as "40.7128, -74.0060", as degrees and minutes, or paste a Google Maps link.

All map tools, free and without an account. Location data is processed in your browser and by the open geocoding services named on the sources page; nothing is stored by this site.