Getting driving distance between two points (lat, lon) using R and Google Map API

Question

I am trying to get the driving distance between two points with lat/lon given. I can manually put them into google map and get the driving distance but I want to do all this programatically.

I guess JavaScript is the language to go. But, I do not know JavaScript and I am fairly familiar using R. I would prefer to do it in R since I am doing all the data analysis in R.

I am looking for distance along the road not crow-fly distance. After few hours of trying, I wrote the following function in R (This and this one helped). Do you have any better way to get the distance either within this function or anything very very simpler?

library(XML)
latlon2ft <- function(origin,destination)
{

xml.url <- paste0('http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/distancematrix/xml?origins=',origin,'&destinations=',destination,'&mode=driving&sensor=false')

xmlfile <- xmlTreeParse(xml.url)
xmltop = xmlRoot(xmlfile)
distance <- xmltop[['row']][[1]][5][1][['distance']][['value']][[1]]
distance <- as.numeric(unclass(distance)[['value']])
ft <- distance*3.28084 # FROM METER TO FEET
return(ft)
}

latlon2ft(origin='37.193489,-121.07395',destination='37.151616,-121.046586')

RESULT = 17224.41

Answer 1

I authored the gmapsdistance package to do just that. It is available on CRAN. You can use the function in the following way:

results = gmapsdistance(origin = "38.1621328+24.0029257",
                        destination = "37.9908372+23.7383394",
                        mode = "walking") results
# $Time
# [1] 30025
# 
# $Distance
# [1] 39507
# 
# $Status
# [1] "OK"

You can also include vectors of origins and destinations, and get the resulting distance matrix. It supports also directions, and has a bunch of options:

results = gmapsdistance(origin = c("Washington+DC", "New+York+NY", "Seattle+WA", "Miami+FL"), 
                        destination = c("Los+Angeles+CA", "Austin+TX", "Chicago+IL", "Philadelphia+PA"), 
                        mode = "bicycling", 
                        departure = 1514742000)
results
# $Time
#              or Time.Los+Angeles+CA Time.Austin+TX Time.Chicago+IL Time.Philadelphia+PA
# 1 Washington+DC              856621         535146          247765                54430
# 2   New+York+NY              917486         596011          308630                32215
# 3    Seattle+WA              374692         678959          674989               956702
# 4      Miami+FL              829039         416667          452035               411283
# 
# $Distance
#              or Distance.Los+Angeles+CA Distance.Austin+TX Distance.Chicago+IL Distance.Philadelphia+PA
# 1 Washington+DC                 4567470            2838519             1303067                   266508
# 2   New+York+NY                 4855086            3126136             1590684                   160917
# 3    Seattle+WA                 1982354            3562970             3588297                  5051951
# 4      Miami+FL                 4559205            2279966             2381610                  2169382
# 
# $Status
#              or status.Los+Angeles+CA status.Austin+TX status.Chicago+IL status.Philadelphia+PA
# 1 Washington+DC                    OK               OK                OK                     OK
# 2   New+York+NY                    OK               OK                OK                     OK
# 3    Seattle+WA                    OK               OK                OK                     OK
# 4      Miami+FL                    OK               OK                OK                     OK