Start with the obvious question. How far does 50 kilometres really get you out of Wellington? The map above answers it, and the answer is usually further than people picture. Circles are drawn at 5, 10, 25 and 50 kilometres from -41.2866, 174.7756. Once the page loads they’re ordinary shapes, so resize them or drag them wherever you like.
6 places sit inside the outer circle, and they aren’t spread evenly. 1 of them fall within 5 km of the centre. The band between 25 and 50 km picks up 2 more while covering about 75 times the ground. Normal pattern. Population clusters and area doesn’t.
The inner circle has no GeoNames name anywhere on it, which tells you something about how Wellington is built. At the other end, Paraparaumu is 45.8 km out to the north-north-east, near enough the edge of the 50 km ring. Everything in between scales from those two.
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. Karori is listed at 2.9 km because that’s the gap between two reference points. Its nearer edge is closer than that, probably by a good margin.
1 place inside 5 km, 15,380 people, 79 km² of ground.
| Place | Distance | Bearing | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Karori | 2.9 km | W 276° | 15,380 |
No entries. This band covers 236 km² and nothing in it clears the 15,000 floor.
3 places between 10 and 25 km, 196,150 people, 1,649 km² of ground.
| Place | Distance | Bearing | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lower Hutt | 14.1 km | ENE 57° | 114,200 |
| Wainuiomata | 14.7 km | E 81° | 20,450 |
| Porirua | 18.1 km | NNE 20° | 61,500 |
2 places between 25 and 50 km, 77,300 people, 5,890 km² of ground.
| Place | Distance | Bearing | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upper Hutt | 28.3 km | NE 54° | 47,400 |
| Paraparaumu | 45.8 km | NNE 26° | 29,900 |
Place names, coordinates and populations come from GeoNames, which the site uses under CC BY 4.0.
Worth pausing on the areas. 79 km² inside 5 km. 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.
| Radius | Area inside (km²) | This band only (km²) | Places in band | People in band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 km | 79 | 79 | 1 | 15,380 |
| 10 km | 314 | 236 | 0 | 0 |
| 25 km | 1,963 | 1,649 | 3 | 196,150 |
| 50 km | 7,854 | 5,890 | 2 | 77,300 |
Put the two tables together and you get a crude density. Inside the 25 km circle there are about 593,430 listed people spread over 1,963 km², so roughly 302 per km². 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 Wellington 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 km ring is within 25 kilometres of Wellington, 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 Wellington 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 Wellington is 381,900, 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. Christchurch is nearest at 305.5 km south-west, which means its 50 km ring never comes anywhere near this one.