Distance signpost to world cities

How to use the distance signpost

1. Choose the From place: one of about 280 world cities, or a point given by latitude and longitude.
2. The signpost table lists about 60 major cities, sorted with the nearest first. For each city it shows the great-circle distance in kilometers and miles and the direction you would set off in.
3. To see full details for one pair of places, such as the halfway point, the distance in nautical miles or a rough flight time, choose a To place as well. The distance calculator page covers those results.

How the directions work

Each direction is the initial bearing of the great-circle route: the compass heading you would follow at the start of the shortest path. The bearing is rounded to the nearest point of a 16-point compass, so each label covers a slice of 22.5 degrees.

Why London to New York is not due west

New York (about 40.7° N) is further south than London (about 51.5° N), so you might expect the direction to be south of west. Yet the signpost says west-north-west, an initial bearing of about 288°.

The reason is that the shortest route on a globe is a great circle, not a line of constant compass heading. A great circle between two places in the northern hemisphere bulges toward the pole. Leaving London, the route heads slightly north of west, passes south of Greenland, then curves round and approaches New York from the north-east. If you stretched a string between the two cities on a globe, you would see the same curve. On a standard Mercator map, a straight line between the two cities looks shorter, but that constant-heading route is actually about 220 km longer.

Example: from London

Tokyo lies north-north-east of London for the same reason: the shortest route crosses Scandinavia and Siberia rather than heading east. To see the local time in any of these cities, open the world clock, or compare clocks with the time difference calculator.