Canberra radius map: 5, 10, 25 and 50 kilometre circles

A quick anchor for the scale. Ten kilometres out, there’s nothing on the GeoNames list at all. The furthest name in these tables is Tuggeranong, 15.7 km away to the south-south-west, and it still sits inside the outer circle. People underestimate that big ring every time, which is most of why this page exists.

Read the distances as point to point. GeoNames gives every settlement one coordinate, roughly central, and these figures are the gaps between those coordinates. A sprawling suburb whose centre lands at 10 km might well start at half that. Where the boundary actually matters, draw the circle and look at where the line crosses.

Place names, coordinates and populations come from GeoNames, which the site uses under CC BY 4.0.

Here’s the thing people get wrong about a radius. Double it and you quadruple the ground underneath. Going from 5 kilometres to 50 multiplies the area by a hundred, so 79 km² becomes 7,854 km². The outermost band on its own, the gap between the 25 and 50 km circles, accounts for 5,890 km². Three quarters of everything inside the big circle, in one band.

Set the areas next to the place counts and Canberra looks sparse, which is partly real and partly the dataset. 1,963 km² inside the 25 km circle, 5,890 km² more in the band beyond it, and almost no names attached to any of it. Use the circles for the ground they cover. For who lives on that ground, the table here can only undercount.

Every circle here is a straight-line radius, measured crow-flies. Tuggeranong shows up at 15.7 km south-south-west, and the road out there will be longer. Always is. In a town laid out on a grid, reckon on 20 to 40 per cent more actual travel than the radius says. Put a river, a harbour or a decent hill in the way and that rule of thumb stops meaning much at all.

If travel time is genuinely what you need, use these rings to narrow the field first and check the survivors properly afterwards. The circle is cheap, instant, and honest about what it measures. It also can’t tell you that the 10 km to the north crosses water while the same 10 km to the south is dual carriageway the whole way.

On the arithmetic. Distances are great-circle distances on a sphere of radius 6,371.0088 km, worked out with the haversine formula, and each bearing is the initial heading you’d take leaving Canberra. Areas use the spherical cap rather than πr², which shaves a hair off the flat answer. About one part in seventy thousand at 50 kilometres. Invisible, and true anyway.

All of it was computed when the site was built, then written into a file that ships with the page. Nothing here is fetched while you read. That’s why the tables are in the HTML the server sends rather than appearing a second later, and it’s why the figures can’t drift: rerun the build and every number on all fifty of these pages is recalculated from the same dump.

Most of the traffic to a page like this is practical. Somebody wants to know which towns near Canberra fall inside a service area, or how many people live within 25 kilometres of a site they’re weighing up. The table answers the first one outright. For the second, take the ring populations as a floor, since everything under 15,000 people is missing from them.