The circle this tool draws is a set of points all the same straight-line distance from the centre — what navigators call a crow-flies or as-the-crow-flies radius. Every point on the edge is genuinely, measurably that far from the middle. Nothing about it accounts for how you would actually get there.
That distinction turns out to matter more than most people expect, so it is worth being precise about what the circle does and does not tell you.
A radius is not a travel time
Draw a 5 km radius around a point in central Manhattan and the circle will happily cross the Hudson. On the map those two places are five kilometres apart; on the ground one of them is a tunnel queue away. The same thing happens around every bay, ridge, motorway, rail cutting and closed military zone in the world.
The shape that answers “where can I get to in 20 minutes?” is called an isochrone, and it is almost never a circle — it stretches along fast roads and collapses where the network is poor. If your question is about reachability rather than distance, a radius will overstate your coverage, sometimes badly. Use it when distance itself is the thing you care about: a contractual service radius, a signal range, a buffer zone, a “within X km of here” property filter.
Picking a radius
If you are starting from a rough intuition rather than a fixed number, these are the distances that tend to come up:
| Radius | Ballpark travel | What it usually represents |
|---|---|---|
| 400 m / ¼ mile | about 5 minutes on foot | The distance transit planners treat as the comfortable walk to a bus stop. |
| 800 m / ½ mile | about 10 minutes on foot | Standard catchment for a rail station or a neighbourhood shop. |
| 3 km / 2 miles | 5–10 minutes by car in town | Roughly the reach of a takeaway delivery rider in dense traffic. |
| 10 km / 6 miles | 15–25 minutes by car | A suburban service area, if the road network cooperates. |
| 50 km / 30 miles | under an hour on open road | Regional coverage — but easily an afternoon if there is water or mountain in the way. |
The travel column is a sanity check, not a promise — it is exactly the assumption the previous section warns about.
Why the circle is not quite a circle
This map uses Web Mercator, the projection almost every online map uses, which stretches distances more and more as you move away from the equator. A shape that is a true constant-distance circle on the globe therefore has to be drawn slightly taller than it is wide on screen. Near the equator the difference is invisible; in Norway or southern Chile it is obvious.
The drawn shape is the correct one. If it looks subtly oval at high latitude, that is the projection being honest rather than the measurement being wrong.
Need the distance between two specific places instead of an area around one? How far is it between answers that directly.