New York City radius map: 5, 10, 25 and 50 mile circles

A quick anchor for the scale. Ten miles from the centre reaches roughly to Fort Lee, 9.6 mi north. The furthest name in these tables is Fairfield, 48.7 mi away to the north-east, 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 mi 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.

Worth pausing on the areas. 79 mi² inside 5 mi. 314 inside 10. 7,854 by the time you reach 50. Each step looks modest on screen and is anything but on the ground, because the maths squares the radius while your eye just reads a line that got a bit wider.

Cross the two tables and something useful falls out. The 25 mi disc holds 21,464,954 listed people across 1,963 mi², about 10,935 per mi². Push out to 50 and you buy 5,890 mi² more for only 2,883,812 extra people. Most of that last band is empty, which is what you’d expect and still surprises people when they see it drawn.

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 New York City 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.

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 mi to the north crosses water while the same 10 mi to the south is dual carriageway the whole way.

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 New York City 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.

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 New York City fall inside a service area, or how many people live within 25 miles 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.