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Google map scale

It always frustrate me to find maps don't come with scale. It is particular important if you try to judge whether a route is within walking distance. Google map is an incredible tool. But it needs to show the scale too!

So I have decided to make my measurements and come up with some reasonable estimate. I will use the zoom control as the scale. Up to 9 zoom levels were measured with level 1 being the most detail. The distance between the center of + mark and the - mark, is shown below. Beware that the projected images near the poles (e.g. Helsinki,Finland) seems significantly distorted.

LevelDistance
1230m
2450m
3870m
41.7km
53.3km
66.4km
712km
824km
947km

2005.06.24 [] - comments (4)

 

 

Comments (4)

Did I miss it or is your own scale missing a scale....on level 1, 230 m is measured by what distance on the map?

Posted by Becky at Thu Jul 14 20:50:35 2005



Nevermind.  I see you are using the distance between the + and - .  OK.  Thanks

Posted by Becky at Thu Jul 14 20:53:05 2005



Google finally did the sensible thing to put a scale on the map :) I'm glad it has metric also.

Posted by Wai Yip Tung at Wed Aug 10 10:32:00 2005



I put google Map on my website (in Traditional Chinese :>) through Google API. I think Google Map uses latitude and longitude to decide what the scale of the map is using. As the spacing between two longitude lines is uneven on the Earth's surface, the distance between two points should not fixed on different latitude (higher the latitude is, shorter the distance between two longitude lines are). Therefore, the distance between two points on high latitude will be shorter even thought at the same scale (zoom level).

In fact, I find many methods to get the lat/long information from Google Map through API. But I can find no method to get the distance (in km/mile) information from Google Map through API.

You can also try to take a look of the Map at zoom level 17 (World map). Greenland is exaggerated and it seems larger than China!

Posted by CHU K L (from Hong Kong) at Sat Oct 8 03:45:02 2005



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