Calculate total miles traveled from vectors of lat / lon

Question

I have a data frame with data about a driver and the route they followed. I\'m trying to figure out the total mileage traveled. I\'m using the geosphere packa

Answer 1

How about this?

## Setup
library(geosphere)
metersPerMile <- 1609.34
pts <- df1[c("lon", "lat")]

## Pass in two derived data.frames that are lagged by one point
segDists <- distVincentyEllipsoid(p1 = pts[-nrow(df),], 
                                  p2 = pts[-1,])
sum(segDists)/metersPerMile
# [1] 1013.919

(To use one of the faster distance calculation algorithms, just substitute distCosine, distVincentySphere, or distHaversine for distVincentyEllipsoid in the call above.)