Calculate (road travel) distance between postcodes/zipcodes python

Question

I have a csv file with start and end postcodes (UK equivalent of US zipcodes) and would like to compute simple distance, road travel distance and travel time between the two. I guess the way to go would be to use Google maps in one way or another. I first tried using some spreadhsheet and the following url http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr="&B2&"&daddr="&A2&" but

1. I do not know how to retrieve the resulting distance from google maps
2. I would like to know some more pythonic way to work this out

Answer 1

The distance between postal codes can be obtained with the pgeocode library. Unlike the above response, it does not query a web API, and is therefore more suitable for processing large amounts of data,

 >>> import pgeocode

 >>> dist = pgeocode.GeoDistance('GB')
 >>> dist.query_postal_code('WC2N', 'EH53')
 536.5  # retured distance in km

More information about these postal codes, including latitude and longitude, can be queried with,

 >>> nomi = pgeocode.Nominatim('GB')
 >>> nomi.query_postal_code(['WC2N', 'EH53'])
   postal_code country code                                     place_name  \
 0        WC2N           GB                                         London   
 1        EH53           GB  Pumpherston, Mid Calder, East Calder, Oakbank   

   state_name state_code     county_name county_code community_name  \
 0    England        ENG  Greater London    11609024            NaN   
 1   Scotland        SCT    West Lothian         WLN            NaN   

   community_code  latitude  longitude  accuracy  
 0            NaN   51.5085  -0.125700       4.0  
 1            NaN   55.9082  -3.479025       4.0

This uses the GeoNames postal code dataset to get the GPS coordinates, then computes the Haversine (great circle) distance on those. Most countries are supported.

In the particular case of Great Britain, only the outward codes are included in the GB dataset, the full dataset is also available as GB_full but it is currently not supported in pgeocode.