Four circles are on the map already, centred on 30.3322, -81.6556. That’s where GeoNames puts Jacksonville, close enough to the middle of town for most of what people bring here. The rings step out at 5, 10, 25 and 50 miles. Every figure in the tables below was measured from that one point, so if your centre belongs somewhere else, drag it and read the map instead of the table.
Inside the full 50 mi circle, GeoNames counts 9 towns and cities holding about 1,230,517 people, Jacksonville included. The closest is Fruit Cove, 15.3 mi south. Past the 25 mi mark things thin out noticeably, which the ring populations further down make obvious.
Numbers on their own are hard to feel. Five miles out of Jacksonville clears the built-up part and finds nothing GeoNames has bothered to name. Stretch it to 25 and you’re out past St. Marys, 28.3 mi north-north-east. Hold those in your head and the rest of the map scales itself.
One caution before you lean on the table. A GeoNames centre is a single point, usually somewhere near the historic core, and a city isn’t a point. Fruit Cove is listed at 15.3 mi because that’s the gap between two reference points. Its nearer edge is closer than that, probably by a good margin.
No entries. This band covers 79 mi² and nothing in it clears the 15,000 floor.
Nothing. GeoNames has no settlement of 15,000 or more between 5 and 10 mi of the centre.
7 places between 10 and 25 mi, 186,229 people, 1,649 mi² of ground.
| Place | Distance | Bearing | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fruit Cove | 15.3 mi | S 177° | 29,362 |
| Oakleaf Plantation | 15.5 mi | SW 224° | 20,315 |
| Lakeside | 15.5 mi | SSW 206° | 30,943 |
| Jacksonville Beach | 15.9 mi | E 99° | 23,064 |
| Fleming Island | 16.9 mi | SSW 193° | 27,126 |
| Ponte Vedra Beach | 17.3 mi | ESE 112° | 35,400 |
| Palm Valley | 19.2 mi | SE 124° | 20,019 |
2 places between 25 and 50 mi, 34,455 people, 5,890 mi² of ground.
| Place | Region | Distance | Bearing | Population |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| St. Marys | Georgia | 28.3 mi | NNE 13° | 17,968 |
| Kingsland | Georgia | 32.4 mi | N 356° | 16,487 |
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 miles to 50 multiplies the area by a hundred, so 79 mi² becomes 7,854 mi². The outermost band on its own, the gap between the 25 and 50 mi circles, accounts for 5,890 mi². Three quarters of everything inside the big circle, in one band.
| Radius | Area inside (mi²) | This band only (mi²) | Places in band | People in band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 mi (8.05 km) | 79 | 79 | 0 | 0 |
| 10 mi (16.09 km) | 314 | 236 | 0 | 0 |
| 25 mi (40.23 km) | 1,963 | 1,649 | 7 | 186,229 |
| 50 mi (80.47 km) | 7,854 | 5,890 | 2 | 34,455 |
Put the two tables together and you get a crude density. Inside the 25 mi circle there are about 1,196,062 listed people spread over 1,963 mi², so roughly 609 per mi². Crude is the right word. It counts GeoNames settlements only, so villages and open country vanish, and it treats a harbour or a reservoir as populated ground.
These are straight-line rings. That’s the right tool for a coverage question and the wrong one for travel time. A 30-minute drive out of Jacksonville comes out as a lopsided blob, an isochrone, racing down a motorway and stopping dead at a bridge. Drawing one properly takes a routing server. This site hasn’t got one, deliberately, because everything runs in your browser with no account and nothing uploaded.
Plenty of sites draw a plain circle, label it drive time and leave it there. Those are worth ignoring. A proper isochrone needs a road graph, turn restrictions and some idea of traffic, and it changes shape by the hour. What a circle gives you instead is a bound that doesn’t move: nothing outside the 25 mi ring is within 25 miles of Jacksonville, whatever the roads do.
Where it all comes from. Names, coordinates and populations are GeoNames cities15000, which covers settlements of roughly 15,000 people and up. Anything smaller is simply absent. City subdivisions get stripped out on purpose, so a page about Jacksonville doesn’t fill with its own neighbourhoods instead of its neighbours. Distances are haversine on a 6,371.0088 km sphere, areas are spherical caps.
One oddity you’ll notice if you compare pages. Population counts come from GeoNames, which records what the national statistics office last published, so some are a few years old and a couple are more. They’re good for ranking and for rough sizing. The figure carried for Jacksonville is 1,009,833, which for some cities means the municipality and for others the whole urban area, so compare it with care.
What people actually use these rings for, roughly in order of how often it comes up: delivery and service areas, finding somewhere to live within a sensible distance of work, sizing a catchment for a shop or a clinic, checking how far an event’s noise and traffic will carry. Straight-line distance is the right first pass for all of them.
The five closest cities with their own page are listed below, measured from this same centre. Atlanta is nearest at 285.2 mi north-north-west, which means its 50 mi ring never comes anywhere near this one.