Measuring distance in meters from a drawn route in MKMapView

Question

How can I calculate the route distance between two coordinates in MKMapView? I'm not asking for the straight line distance but the distance for a route with turns.

Answer 1

I'm assuming you're using an MKDirectionsRequest to get a MKDirectionsResponse from which you're getting your route. For example:

MKDirectionsRequest *request = [[MKDirectionsRequest alloc] init];

// source and destination are the relevant MKMapItem's
request.source = source;
request.destination = destination;

// Specify the transportation type
request.transportType = MKDirectionsTransportTypeAutomobile;

// If you're open to getting more than one route, requestsAlternateRoutes = YES; else requestsAlternateRoutes = NO;
request.requestsAlternateRoutes = YES;

MKDirections *directions = [[MKDirections alloc] initWithRequest:request];

[directions calculateDirectionsWithCompletionHandler:^(MKDirectionsResponse *response, NSError *error) {

    if (!error) {
        self.directionsResponse = response;                           
    }
}];

Once you get the MKDirectionsResponse (in this case self.directionsResponse) and decide on a specific route index from that response, the CLLocationDistance of that route (measured in meters) can be found using:

MKRoute *route = self.directionsResponse.routes[currentRoute];
CLLocationDistance distance = route.distance;

And if you don't know which specific route you want to use -- ex. if you want to decide on a route based on the distance -- you can go through the directionsResponse.route array with a loop to get all the route distances.

Edit: Furthermore, if you want to find the distance in time (measured in seconds), you can do so using:

NSTimeInterval seconds = route.expectedTravelTime;

---

And in Swift:

let request:MKDirectionsRequest = MKDirectionsRequest()

// source and destination are the relevant MKMapItems
request.setSource(source)
request.setDestination(destination)

// Specify the transportation type
request.transportType = MKDirectionsTransportType.Automobile;

// If you're open to getting more than one route, 
// requestsAlternateRoutes = true; else requestsAlternateRoutes = false;
request.requestsAlternateRoutes = true

let directions = MKDirections(request: request)

directions.calculateDirectionsWithCompletionHandler ({
    (response: MKDirectionsResponse?, error: NSError?) in

    if error == nil {
        self.directionsResponse = response
    }
})

To get the distance:

let route = directionsResponse.routes[currentRoute] as MKRoute
let distance = route.distance

To get the expected travel time:

let seconds = route.expectedTravelTime

Answer 2

iOS 7 has introduced direction based API known as MKDirections API this helps with root based direction data by which you can play in your application.Refer to below link for more documentation on MKDirection API

MKDirection API