get_stop_distances: Get distances between stops

In gtfstools: General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) Editing and Analysing Tools

Get distances between stops

Description

Returns the great-circle distance between each pair of stops visited by the given trips and/or routes.

Usage

get_stop_distances(gtfs, trip_id = NULL, route_id = NULL)

Arguments

gtfs	A GTFS object, as created by read_gtfs().
trip_id	A character vector including the trip_ids whose stops should be considered. If NULL (the default), all trips are considered. An empty vector selects no trip.
route_id	A character vector including the route_ids whose stops should be considered. If NULL (the default), all routes are considered. An empty vector selects no route.

Value

A data.table with the columns from_stop_id, to_stop_id and distance (in meters), with one row for each pair of distinct stops, sorted by from_stop_id and to_stop_id. It is empty if fewer than two stops are selected.

Details

The stops are selected as in get_stops(): only the stops listed in the stop_times entries of the selected trips are considered.

Distances are great-circle distances ("as the crow flies") between the stops' coordinates, not distances along the trips' shapes or the street network.

Each pair of stops appears only once, with the stop_id that comes first in the C locale (the order used by data.table) as from_stop_id. If a stop_id is listed more than once in stops, only its first entry is used. Stops without coordinates have NA distances.

The size of the result grows with the square of the number of stops: about 1 GB of memory is used for 5,500 stops, and about 3 GB for 10,000 stops. A warning is raised when more than 1 GB is needed, so on large feeds please select only the trips or routes of interest. More than 65,536 stops can't be used at once, raising an error.

See Also

get_stops(), get_trip_length()

Examples

data_path <- system.file("extdata/spo_gtfs.zip", package = "gtfstools")
gtfs <- read_gtfs(data_path)

# distances between the stops visited by a trip
distances <- get_stop_distances(gtfs, trip_id = "CPTM L07-0")
head(distances)

# distances between the stops visited by the trips of a route
distances <- get_stop_distances(gtfs, route_id = "CPTM L07")
head(distances)

gtfstools documentation built on Oct. 28, 2026, 5:13 p.m.