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

Be VERY careful with missing data, as distVincentyEllipsoid() returns 0 for distance between any two points with missing coordinates c(NA, NA), c(NA, NA).

Answer 2

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.)

Answer 3

library(geodist)
geodist(df, sequential = TRUE, measure = "geodesic") # sequence of distance increments
sum(geodist(df, sequential = TRUE, measure = "geodesic")) # total distance in metres
sum(geodist(df, sequential = TRUE, measure = "geodesic")) * 0.00062137 # total distance in miles

Geodesic distances are necessary here because of the long distances involved. The result is 1013.915, slightly different from less-accurate Vincenty distances of geosphere. Street network distances can also be calculated with

library(dodgr)
dodgr_dists(from = df)

... but there has to be a street network, which is not the case for (lat = 76, lon = -110). Where there is a street network, that will by default give you all pair-wise distances routed through the street network , from which the sequential increments are the off-diagonal.