[R] computing distance in miles or km between 2 street addre

[Philip James Smith]

Thank you for your useful response. I will study it carefully.

Best regards,
Phil Smith

(Ted Harding) wrote:
> On 06-Sep-07 18:42:32, Philip James Smith wrote:
>   
>> Hi R-ers:
>>
>> I need to compute the distance between 2 street addresses in
>> either km or miles. I do not care if the distance is a "shortest
>> driving route" or if it is "as the crow flies."
>>
>> Does anybody know how to do this? Can it be done in R? I have
>> thousands of addresses, so I think that Mapquest is out of the
>> question!
>>
>> Please rely to: philipsmith at alumni.albany.edu
>>
>> Thank you!
>> Phil Smith
>>     
>
> That's a somewhat ill-posed question! You will for a start
> need a database of some kind, either of geographical locations
> (coordinates) of street addresses, or of the metric of the
> road network with capability to identify the street addresses
> in the database.
>
> If it's just "as the crow flies", then it can be straightforwardly
> computed in R, either by Pythogoras (when they are not too far
> apart) or using a function which takes account of the shape of
> the Earth,
>
> There are many R packages which have to do with mapping data.
> Search for "map" through the list of R packages at
>
> http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/library/maptools/html/00Index.html
>
> -- maptools in particular. Also look at (for instance) aspace.
>
> For "shortest driving route" then you need to find the shortest
> distance through a network. You may find some hints in the
> package optim -- but there must be some R experts out there
> on this sort of thing!
>
> However, the primary need is for the database which gives
> the distance information in one form or another. What were
> you proposing to use for this? As far as I know, R has no
> database relevant to street addresses!
>
> Best wishes,
> Ted.
>
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> E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
> Date: 06-Sep-07                                       Time: 23:17:57
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