We hear distances all the time — "the fire is 20 miles away", "the stage is 120 miles long", "she lives 1,000 miles from here" — but our brain is bad at picturing them. The map above draws a circle whose radius is the distance you type: everything inside the circle is closer than that distance to the centre, as the crow flies. Type a distance, pick the unit (miles, kilometres or metres) and drag the map to your home or a place you know.
A mile equals 1.609 kilometres (exactly 1,609.344 metres). Conversely, a kilometre is roughly 0.62 miles — which is why metric distances often "don't add up" at first glance.
| Distance | Equivalent |
|---|---|
| 1 mile | 1.609 km · 1,609 m |
| 1 kilometre | 1,000 m · 0.62 miles |
| 100 miles | 160.93 km |
| 100 kilometres | 62.14 miles |
| 1,000 miles | 1,609.34 km |
To get a sense of the magnitudes (approximate straight-line distances):
Click any of these figures (or type your own into the tool) and move the map: you will see at a glance how far that distance reaches from the point you choose.
Want to visualize areas instead of distances? Try the Hectareometer, which draws how much space any number of hectares takes, or see examples like 1,000 hectares. And for volumes, see how much water any amount of litres really is.