Calculate travel distances, times, and costs between locations. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Travel collection.
Use Cases
Calculate driving time and distance between cities for road trip planning.
Compare multiple routes between two destinations by total distance and estimated driving time.
Estimate fuel cost for a trip using distance and vehicle fuel economy.
Calculate commute distance when evaluating a potential new home location.
Tips
Calculate driving distance separately from straight-line (as-the-crow-flies) distance — driving distances are typically 20–40% longer than straight-line for most routes.
Account for border crossing wait times on international drives — they can add 1–4 hours to cross-border routes at busy crossings.
For multi-stop trips, use the nearest-neighbor algorithm to find a reasonably efficient route order before optimizing further.
Fun Facts
The driving distance from New York to Los Angeles (2,790 miles via I-40) would take approximately 41 hours of non-stop driving at highway speeds — but the same distance in a straight line is only 2,451 miles.
The longest drivable distance within a single country is the Trans-Canada Highway from Victoria, BC to St. John's, NL at 7,821 km (4,860 miles).
Google Maps launched its driving directions feature in 2007, three years after the service launched with maps-only navigation. It now processes over 1 billion kilometers of driving directions per day globally.
FAQ
How is driving time estimated?
Driving time = distance / average speed. Highway average including stops is typically 60–65 mph in the US. Add 15–20% for urban segments, mountain terrain, and border crossings. Real-world time is typically 10–15% over pure driving time estimates.
What is haversine distance vs. driving distance?
Haversine calculates the great-circle distance between two GPS coordinates (the shortest path on the Earth's surface). Driving distance follows road networks and is always longer. For most continental routes, driving distance is 15–40% longer than haversine.
