About Miles Between Cities
Miles Between Cities exists to answer one question completely and honestly: how far is it from one American city to another? That question sounds simple until you try to answer it well, because it is really three questions — how far apart are the cities on the map, how far apart are they on the road, and how long will the journey between them actually take? Most sources blur those three answers into a single unexplained number. We publish all three, separately, each with its method attached, so a reader can see not just the figure but what kind of figure it is.
The site is built on public data rather than on scraped commercial services. City coordinates come from the U.S. Census Bureau Gazetteer files, driving routes for measured pairs come from OpenStreetMap data routed with the OSRM engine, and where no measured route is published our driving figure is a documented estimate — the straight-line distance multiplied by a circuity factor of 1.25, with drive time at an assumed average of 50 miles per hour — labelled as an estimate everywhere it appears. Our full working is set out on the methodology page, including the haversine formula we use for straight-line distances and the limits every reader should keep in mind.
We cover the largest cities in the United States — the places between which Americans most often move, visit, commute, deliver and road-trip. Each major city has a hub page collecting its distances to every other city in the index, and the most searched city pairs have their own pages with a comparison table, direction and bearing, time-zone notes, route summaries where routing provides them, and answers to the questions readers actually ask about that journey. A set of plain-language guides explains the concepts behind the numbers, from circuity to time zones, so the site teaches as well as tabulates.
Accuracy matters more to us than volume. We would rather publish a shorter list of pairs whose figures we can source and explain than a longer list padded with numbers of unknown origin, and we would rather label a figure an estimate than dress it up as a measurement. Where a journey cannot be driven at all — across an ocean, for instance — we publish the straight-line distance alone and say plainly that no road route exists, instead of inventing a drive. Corrections are welcome through the contact page: send the pair, the figure you believe is wrong, and your source, and we will check it against ours.
Miles Between Cities is a reference publication, not a navigation service. Our figures are planning figures, prepared from October 2026 data, and they are designed to be checked against live conditions before any real journey. We do not sell travel, we do not book anything, and we do not track readers around the web beyond the ordinary analytics and advertising arrangements described in our privacy policy. The site is free to use and is supported by advertising, which is kept clearly separate from the editorial content it appears alongside.
Our Editorial Team
The Miles Between Cities Editorial Team is the small group of researchers and writers responsible for this site's data and words. The team's work divides into three parts: sourcing, which obtains coordinates and routes from the public sources named above and records when each was retrieved; calculation, which applies the published methodology uniformly across every pair so that no page's figures are produced by a different recipe from any other's; and writing, which turns each pair's data into the context a traveller needs — direction, time zones, the meaning of the gap between the road and the straight line, and honest advice about the drive. The team reviews pages when source data is refreshed, regenerating figures rather than editing them by hand, and handles the corrections readers send in. Every page on this site carries the team's byline and a last-updated date, because anonymous, undated numbers are numbers nobody has to stand behind.
Methodology
In brief: coordinates from the U.S. Census Bureau Gazetteer files; straight-line distance by the haversine formula; driving distance measured via OpenStreetMap routing (OSRM) for pairs labelled measured, or estimated with a 1.25 circuity factor and a 50 mph time assumption for pairs labelled estimate; drive times always presented as estimates. The long version, with the reasoning behind each choice, lives on our methodology page.
Sources: Coordinates: U.S. Census Bureau Gazetteer files; driving data: OpenStreetMap/OSRM — retrieved October 2026.