One tool, four answers. Use it as a driving distance calculator with travel time and fuel cost, a flight distance calculator that gives the air miles between the nearest airports, a sea distance calculator for port to port distances in nautical miles, or simply as a distance calculator map to measure the straight-line distance between two points. It works for the distance between cities, between two addresses, or between any two locations on Earth.
How to use the distance calculator
- Type where you start and where you are going. A city, a street address, a landmark like the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower, or plain coordinates all work. Pick a suggestion from the list.
- Or set points on the map. Right-click anywhere on the map (on a phone, press and hold) and choose Set as From or Set as To, or Cancel. Once a route is drawn you can drag the green and orange pins to fine-tune it, and Use my location fills in where you are now.
- Choose what the CO₂ and cost are for. The distances are the same whatever you pick; this choice changes the comparison underneath. Passengers compares car, coach, train, bus and flight per traveller and works out the trip fuel cost. Parcel takes the weight and box size of one or more parcels, shows the billable weight couriers will charge, and compares courier van, air express and sea. Cargo takes a shipment weight in kg, tonnes or pounds and compares truck, rail, ship and air freight, the four modes logistics standards use.
- Read the results. By default, road, flight, sea and straight-line distance appear side by side, each drawn on the map in its own colour. Only need one of them? Open Route options and untick Show on Road, Flight or Sea to hide that mode from the results, the map and the CO₂ comparison. The straight-line distance always stays as a reference. Switch between kilometres, miles and nautical miles at any time.
- Share or save it. Copy link to this route gives you a link that opens the same result, and Print or save PDF gives you a clean copy for a report or a quote.
Shipping two ports, not two cities? Switch to Port to port at the top of the form. You can then search more than 1,600 seaports by name or by their UN/LOCODE (for example USNYC for New York, NLRTM for Rotterdam or SGSIN for Singapore), set a departure date, and get the sailing time, the arrival date and the canals and straits on the way.
Driving distance vs flight distance vs sea distance
Ask "how far is it?" and the honest answer is "it depends how you go". The driving distance between cities is almost always longer than the flight distance, and the sea distance between ports can be longer still. Here is one real example from this calculator, London to Edinburgh:
| Measure | Distance | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Straight line | 534 km (332 mi) | The shortest path over the Earth's surface. Nobody can actually travel it. |
| Flight (LHR → EDI) | 577 km (359 mi) | Airport to airport along the great circle, plus a margin for real flight paths. |
| Road by car | 648 km (403 mi) | The real drivable route, about 7 h 20 min without stops. |
Over short distances the gap is small. Over long ones it can be huge, and the sea is where it grows fastest. Singapore and Rotterdam are 10,538 km apart in a straight line, yet a ship sails 15,630 km (8,439 nautical miles) between them, because it has to cross the Indian Ocean, pass through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, cross the Mediterranean and leave it past Gibraltar.
On the road the gap depends on the terrain. New York to Chicago is 1,147 km (713 mi) in a straight line and 1,282 km (797 mi) by road, only about 12% more, because the interstates run fairly directly. In mountains, or around lakes and bays, the road can be half as long again as the straight line.
Sea distance calculator: port to port distance in nautical miles
Sea routes here follow real shipping lanes from the Eurostat maritime network, the same kind of lane network used for official freight statistics. At each end the calculator uses the nearest real seaport in the same country, so a trip from Islamabad sails from Karachi. Inland container depots ("dry ports") are never used, because ships cannot reach them. If a country has no coast, such as Afghanistan or Switzerland, the calculator uses the nearest seaport in a neighbouring country and tells you so. The route never cuts across land. Along the way the calculator tells you which major passages the ship uses: the Suez and Panama canals, the Straits of Malacca, Hormuz and Gibraltar, Bab-el-Mandeb, the Dover Strait and others.
A nautical mile is 1,852 metres, about 1.15 ordinary miles. It is the unit ships and aircraft use because one nautical mile equals one minute of latitude, which makes chart work simple. Speed at sea is measured in knots: one knot is one nautical mile per hour. A container ship sailing at 15 knots covers 360 nautical miles a day.
Some real figures from the calculator:
- Rotterdam to New York: 3,362 nm across the North Atlantic, about 9.3 days at 15 knots.
- Los Angeles to Shanghai: 5,888 nm across the Pacific, about 16.4 days at 15 knots.
- Shanghai to Rotterdam: 10,666 nm via the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal, about 29.6 days at 15 knots.
- The same voyage around Africa: 13,955 nm via the Cape of Good Hope, about 38.8 days. That is the detour many Asia–Europe ships have taken while the Red Sea has been unsafe, roughly 3,300 extra nautical miles and nine more days at sea.
Under Route options, the Sea section lets you avoid the Suez Canal and Red Sea, the Panama Canal or the Strait of Hormuz, and to set the ship's speed. If you enter a vessel draft, canals too shallow for the ship are left out automatically. A Shanghai to New York voyage, for example, uses the Panama Canal (10,756 nm). At a 16-metre draft the ship is too deep for Panama, and the route switches to Suez at 12,458 nm.
Sailing times assume the ship holds the same speed all the way. Real voyages also include time in port, waiting at canals, pilotage and weather, so treat the arrival date as the earliest realistic date, not a booking.
Flight distance calculator: air miles between airports
Flights do not leave from your front door, so the calculator first finds the nearest airport with scheduled passenger flights to each place (it checks more than 3,200 of them), within 250 km. It then measures the great-circle distance between the two airports, the curved path that is the shortest route over a globe and the reason flights from Asia to North America pass close to the Arctic.
Real aircraft rarely fly a perfect great circle. They follow air corridors, avoid closed airspace and queue to land, so we add 8% to the great-circle figure, which brings it in line with typical flown distances. Flight time is an estimate at an average cruising speed of 800 km/h, plus 30 minutes for take-off, climbing and landing. New York to Chicago comes out at 1,260 km (783 mi) between LaGuardia (LGA) and Midway (MDW), about two hours.
Straight-line distance (as the crow flies)
Many online calculators use the haversine formula, which treats the Earth as a perfect sphere. That can be out by up to about 0.5%, or 5 km on a 1,000 km trip. This calculator measures on the WGS-84 ellipsoid instead, the slightly flattened shape of the Earth used by GPS, so the straight-line result is accurate to well under a metre for any two points on the planet.
Distance between two points using coordinates
Surveyors, pilots, sailors and delivery planners often work with coordinates rather than place names. Type them straight into From or To in any of these formats:
- Decimal degrees, latitude first:
48.8584, 2.2945(the Eiffel Tower) - Degrees, minutes and seconds:
40°41'21"N 74°2'40"W(the Statue of Liberty) - Negative numbers for south and west:
-33.8688, 151.2093is Sydney
Every result shows the exact coordinates of both points, so you can copy them into a GPS, a spreadsheet or a shipping document.
Driving cost: fuel and charging
Open Driving cost, enter the price you pay for fuel and how much your vehicle uses, and the road result shows the litres or gallons needed and the cost of the trip. With several travellers it also shows the cost per person, which settles the question of how to split it. You can enter fuel use as US or UK miles per gallon, litres per 100 km or km per litre, and price per gallon or per litre in your own currency. For an electric car, open Route options, choose Electric as the car fuel under Road, then enter kWh per 100 km and your price per kWh. The calculator starts in the units used where you are, and remembers your settings on your device.
The maths is simple. New York to Chicago is 797 miles by road. A car doing 30 mpg needs 797 ÷ 30 = 26.6 US gallons, so at an example price of $3.20 a gallon the fuel costs about $85. In metric terms, a car using 6 litres per 100 km needs 38.9 litres for the 648 km from London to Edinburgh. Tolls, parking and wear on the car are not included.
Travel and shipping CO₂: a carbon footprint comparison
For travellers we use the UK Government greenhouse gas conversion factors (2024), one of the most widely used public sources. A petrol car emits about 0.165 kg of CO₂ per km, shared between up to five people. The electric car figure (0.043 kg per km) assumes the UK electricity mix; on a grid that burns more coal it is higher. Coach, train and local bus figures are per passenger. Flights use separate factors for domestic, short-haul and long-haul flights, including the extra warming effect of emissions at altitude. Choose your cabin class under Route options, Flight: larger seats take up more of the aircraft, so on long-haul flights premium economy counts as 1.6 times economy, business 2.9 times and first 4 times. On short flights, business counts as about 1.5 times economy.
For one person going from London to Edinburgh, the comparison looks like this: coach about 18 kg, train about 23 kg, local bus about 70 kg, petrol car about 107 kg, and flight about 157 kg of CO₂. The train produces roughly a seventh of the flight's emissions, and with two people in the car its share per person halves while the flight figure doubles.
For freight we use the GLEC Framework v3.2, the standard logistics companies use to report emissions, in kg of CO₂ per tonne-kilometre: truck 0.107, rail 0.0307, a large cargo ship 0.0052 and air freight 0.608 (1.516 for flights under 1,500 km). Sea freight is so efficient that one tonne shipped 19,753 km from Shanghai to Rotterdam produces about 103 kg of CO₂, less than the same tonne trucked from London to Edinburgh and back (about 139 kg).
Parcels and volumetric weight
Couriers price parcels by whichever is higher: the actual weight or the volumetric weight, which reflects how much space the box takes up. Express couriers usually divide the box volume in cubic centimetres by 5,000; air cargo uses 6,000. A 30 × 20 × 15 cm box is 9,000 cm³, so its volumetric weight is 1.8 kg, and a 1 kg item in that box is billed as 1.8 kg. In inches the courier divisor is about 305 (139 if you work in pounds and inches).
Parcel CO₂ uses the real weight, because that is what the vehicle carries: courier vans at 0.623 kg per tonne-km (UK Government factors 2024), and air express and sea at the GLEC factors above.
All CO₂ figures are estimates for comparing options. They are not certified carbon reports.
How accurate are the results?
- Road: real routes on OpenStreetMap data from openrouteservice. Driving times assume normal traffic, not rush hour or road works.
- Flight: a close estimate of the flown distance. Actual routes change daily with winds and air traffic control.
- Sea: real shipping lanes between ports. Pilots, anchorages and the approach to each berth can add a few miles.
- Straight line: geodesically exact for the two points chosen.
Questions people ask
How do I find the distance between two cities?
Type both cities above and choose them from the suggestions. You get the road, flight, sea and straight-line distance at once, each drawn on the map.
How do I find the distance between two addresses?
Type a full street address in From and To, pick it from the suggestions, and the calculator shows the driving distance and time between the two addresses, plus the straight-line distance. You can also right-click the map to drop a point on an exact spot.
How many miles between two locations?
Choose two locations, then switch the units to miles. You get the miles by road, the air miles between the nearest airports, the sea distance, and the straight-line miles, all at once.
What is the difference between road distance and straight-line distance?
Straight-line distance, often called distance "as the crow flies", is the shortest path over the Earth's surface. Road distance follows real roads, so it is always longer, usually by 10 to 40 percent depending on the terrain and the road network.
How many kilometres is a nautical mile?
One nautical mile is exactly 1.852 km, or about 1.15 miles. Switch the units to nm to see every result in nautical miles.
How long does a ship take to sail between two ports?
Divide the sea distance in nautical miles by the ship's speed in knots to get hours at sea. Use Port to port mode, set the speed and departure date, and the calculator does this for you and gives the arrival date.
Can I enter latitude and longitude?
Yes. Type coordinates in decimal degrees (latitude first) or in degrees, minutes and seconds with N, S, E and W, or right-click the map (press and hold on a phone) to place a point.
Why is the sea route so much longer than the straight line?
Ships have to sail around continents and through canals and straits, and some routes avoid conflict zones such as the Red Sea. That can make a sea voyage far longer than the straight line: Singapore to Rotterdam is about 50% longer than the straight line, and Shanghai to Rotterdam more than twice as long.
What is volumetric weight?
Volumetric (or dimensional) weight is a parcel's size turned into a weight: length × width × height in cm divided by 5,000 for most express couriers, or 6,000 for air cargo. You are charged for whichever is higher, the actual weight or the volumetric weight.
Can I work out walking or cycling distance?
Yes. Open Route options and, under Road, set Travel by to Bicycle or Walking. You get a route on paths and quiet roads suited to bikes or people on foot, with the time it takes. For long journeys, such as a walk of several hundred kilometres, the route follows the road network and the time is shown in days, at about 30 km a day on foot or 100 km a day by bike.
Is this distance calculator free?
Yes. There is no account to create and nothing to install. It works in any modern browser on a phone or a computer.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Map tiles: OpenFreeMap. Road routing and address search: openrouteservice (HeiGIT). Sea lanes: Eurostat maritime network via searoute-ts. Airports: OurAirports (public domain). Cities: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Emission factors: UK DESNZ 2024 and GLEC Framework v3.2. Volumetric weight divisors: industry standard (express 5,000, IATA air cargo 6,000).