Distance Calculator

No single US federal agency publishes a public town-to-town road distance chart. The Federal Highway Administration collects detailed road-mileage data, but it’s organised around infrastructure statistics within urbanized areas — daily vehicle-miles travelled on specific road classes — not point-to-point intercity trip distances a driver could look up directly. The closest historical equivalent is the Rand McNally Motor Carriers’ Road Atlas mileage chart, an industry-standard reference the trucking industry has relied on for decades, but its exact figures aren’t freely published online in a form this tool could cite directly.

So this tool’s 7 verified routes are widely-repeated driving distances independently quoted across multiple road-trip and logistics sources, for the most commonly driven interstate corridors: New York City to Los Angeles (2,790 miles via I-80/I-70 — the longest regularly-driven city-to-city trip in the continental US), Chicago to Houston (1,090 miles via I-55/I-69), Chicago to Miami (1,380 miles), Dallas to Houston (240 miles), Los Angeles to San Francisco (380 miles), Seattle to Portland (175 miles via I-5), and New York City to Philadelphia (95 miles via I-95).

Every other route among this tool’s 62 major US cities falls back to the Haversine-based GPS estimate, using the same correction factor calibrated against Nigeria’s full verified road matrix. The city list itself is simply the top cities by population, with New York City’s own boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island) excluded as redundant with the city itself — the same call made for every other major metro area in this tool.