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Asked: 2026-05-15T19:12:43+00:00

I need to calculate the distance between two points, but not in the regular

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I need to calculate the distance between two points, but not in the regular way. I need to know ‘the east to west distance’ + ‘the north to south distance’. I guess this is more simple then the regular ‘as the crow flies’ calculation but i still can’t figure out how to do it.

I want to do this using a MySQL query and preferably have the result returned in km. One of the points will be a constant in the query and the other point is a point from the DB so something like SELECT abs(longitude-39.12345)…+abs(latitude… AS Distance FROM shops WHERE shopname=’Bingo’.

Thanks in advance!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The north-to-south distance is proportional to the difference in the latitudes. It’s about 1 nautical mile per minute of arc (the circumference of the earth is about 21600 nautical miles).

    The east-to-west distance is proportional to the difference in the longitudes, but it also varies with the latitude (e.g. it’s zero at the poles): I think it’s proportional to the cosine of latitude.

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