Distance Between Cities — kilometres and miles
The distance between any two cities, in kilometres and miles.
Type in two cities and get the distance between them in kilometres and miles. The figure is the straight-line distance between cities — the shortest path across the Earth's surface, roughly the track a long-haul flight follows.
How to use Distance Between Cities
Enter the first city, enter the second, read the result. The one habit worth forming is checking the country: the planet is full of namesakes, and the gap between Paris, France and Paris, Texas is a very different trip. When a name is ambiguous, be specific and look twice at what was matched.
Each city is reduced to a single reference point, so the answer will not shift with a street address — and for comparing city to city, that is exactly what you want. Door-to-door precision is a route planner's job, not this one's.
Straight line or road?
What is measured here is the great-circle distance: the shortest arc over the curved surface of the planet. Roads never manage it — they bend around mountains, lakes, borders and other people's property — so the driving distance between the same two cities is always longer, sometimes dramatically so in rough terrain. Use the straight-line figure to compare places, and a route planner when you need hours-and-fuel numbers for an actual drive.
Flights come closest to the ideal. Airliners follow airways and winds rather than pure geometry, but over long distances their tracks approximate great circles — which is why routes between Europe and North America arc so far north on a flat map.
What one number is good for
Comparing options fairly: which of three candidate cities is truly nearest. Giving scale to news and history — how far apart two places in a story really are. Sanity-checking travel plans before opening a booking site.
Winning the "is it farther to A or to B" argument with a number instead of volume. Building intuition: distances between world cities are usually larger than a flat map lets you feel. Flat maps are polite liars: on a globe, the shortest way from London to Los Angeles runs up over Greenland, and no paper map will admit it.
What to use the number for
Rough flight time. Divide by a plausible cruising speed and add time for climb, descent and taxi. It gives an order of magnitude, not a schedule. Comparing options. Two candidate destinations, one origin — the straight-line figures rank them fairly, without one being favoured by better roads.
Settling arguments. "Further than" questions between well-known cities usually turn on intuitions that maps have quietly corrupted. Sanity-checking a route. If a proposed journey is three times the straight-line distance, something is going the long way round.
Questions and answers
- Why is the driving distance longer than the number shown here?
- Because roads detour and this measurement does not. The straight-line arc is the floor; every real route adds curves, junctions and geography on top of it.
- Which point in each city is measured?
- A single central reference point per city. That keeps comparisons consistent, but it means your own neighbourhood may be a few kilometres closer or farther than the headline figure.
- Why did I get a city on the wrong continent?
- A namesake. Many city names exist several times over; add the country or region to pin down the one you meant.