Geographic / geospatial distance between 2 lists of lat/lon points (coordinates)

Question

I have 2 lists (list1, list2) with latitude / longitudes of various locations. One list (list2) has locality names that list1

Answer 1

Credits to Martin Haringa for this solution on making this way easier when you need this function performed by traversing down a data frame on Mark Needham's blog

library(dplyr)
library(geosphere)

df %>%
  rowwise() %>%
  mutate(newcolumn_distance = distHaversine(c(df$long1, df$lat1), 
                                            c(df$long2, df$lat2)))

I tested using the two functions distm and distHaversine separately on large samples from real world datasets, and distHaversine seems to come out far faster than the distm function. I'm surprised as I thought the two were merely the same function in two formats.