How it works

Name a city to start from, up to two more stops, and say whether you are coming back. The page measures the straight line between each pair of city centres across a sphere the size of the earth, multiplies that by one stated road factor to stand in for the fact that no road is straight, and converts the result into the three things a long drive actually costs: hours at the wheel, gallons out of the tank, and nights somebody has to pay for. Every conversion runs on a rate you set yourself, and the answer prints those rates underneath itself so you can see exactly what it assumed.

The arithmetic happens inside the page. Nothing is looked up, no routing service is asked and no figure arrives from anywhere else, which is why the total moves the instant you move a dial and why it keeps working on one bar of signal in a parking lot. It is also why the tool knows nothing about roadworks, a closed pass, a bridge, a ferry, or the plain fact that the interstate you want may not go where you are pointing.

Why the answer is an estimate, and which way it is wrong

Great-circle distance is exact and, on its own, useless: it is the distance a bird covers, and nobody driving is a bird. Multiplying it by a road factor is the crudest available correction, and this page applies the same factor to every pair of cities — which means it is wrong in two opposite directions, and it would rather say which than quietly split the difference.

Across flat grid country, where the highway more or less is the straight line, one flat factor overshoots: the road genuinely is straighter than the average road and the estimate comes out long. Across mountains it undershoots, sometimes badly, because the road has to go where the pass is rather than where you are pointing — and the same is true of any leg that has to get around a large body of water. So every leg prints its straight line beside its road estimate. The gap between those two numbers is the whole of the correction, in the open, and if it looks too small for the ground it crosses you now know which way to lean.

This is an estimate and not a routed distance, and it is not a substitute for one. If the number matters — if somebody is waiting at the other end of it — put the two cities into something that actually knows about roads.

The dials are assumptions, not claims

The average speed is door to door, with fuel, food and being briefly lost all included, rather than a cruising speed. That is why even the quickest setting sits below any number on a sign you will pass, and why raising it does less to the total than people expect it to.

The fuel economy is a dial rather than a stated figure, deliberately. Published economy for a large-displacement V8 of that era does not agree with itself between sources, and real consumption depends more on the right foot than on the engine — so the page offers the range such an engine is generally reckoned to sit in, worked hard at one end and driven gently at the other, with something modern at the top purely for scale. Pick the one you believe and the arithmetic will be honest around it.

The fuel price is yours because a national average is out of date the week it is printed and the only figure anybody actually cares about is the one on the pump they actually use. The hours in a day is the dial people set optimistically and then regret; the nights fall straight out of it, because every day of a run except the last one ends somewhere that charges for the privilege.

What it will not tell you

It names no road, no route number, no motel, no diner and no place worth stopping, and it holds no opinion about any of them. It is a table of coordinates, one multiplication, four dials and a division — which is the entire trick, and the whole reason anybody who cares to can check it.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

A road-distance calculator, built for a fandom that spends most of its time in a car. It is a free, unofficial fan tool — an unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Warner Bros. Television, The CW, or any official rights holder of Supernatural.

Every city, coordinate, rate and sentence on this page is either a plain real-world fact or was written for this page; no dialogue, character, vehicle, place, scene or artwork from any television series appears anywhere in it. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of Supernatural. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

Where the rest of them are

Nothing else in this corner is a calculator — the rest of the wing asks about you rather than about a distance: what kind of hunter you would be, how you would leave, or what people would call you on the road. The Supernatural section lists every quiz and tool in this wing, and the fan tributes hub has the rest of the corner. If you would rather play something than fiddle with a tool, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.