Ottawa to Vancouver, British Columbia: distance and driving time
It is about 4,175 km from Ottawa, Ontario to Vancouver, British Columbia, British Columbia, which is roughly 41 hr 11 min of driving. Everything here is an estimate.
The route runs from Ottawa, Ontario to Vancouver, British Columbia, British Columbia, crossing a provincial boundary. Speed limits are posted in kilometres per hour and set province by province, so what is signed can change on the way. At about 41 hr 11 min behind the wheel this is at the edge of a single day. Split over two stages it is a straightforward trip; attempted in one push it is not.
The average of about 101 km/h used here already allows for slower going at each end of the trip, but not for weather, roadworks or a stop. Distances are shown in kilometres first because that is how they are signed in Canada, with miles alongside for anyone working from a US map. Every figure is an estimated road distance rather than a routed one — the method is the same one used across the site.
The route also crosses a time-zone boundary, so the clock at the far end sits 3 hours behind the one you set off with. That matters for anything booked in local time at the destination. Fuel is quoted here in US dollars per US gallon for consistency with the rest of the site; Canadian pumps price per litre and rates differ by province, so convert before treating the figure as a budget rather than a comparison.
Reading these figures in metric, and where they come from
The 4,175 km here is a road estimate, not a routed distance. Straight across the map the two places are about 3,539 km apart, so the roads add roughly 18% on top of the line. That penalty is what makes a straight-line measurement useless for planning fuel: it is the tarmac that decides the distance, and the tarmac goes where the terrain and the settlements allow.
The fuel figure needs converting before it means anything at a Canadian pump. About 102.1 US gallons is roughly 387 litres, and Canadian prices are quoted per litre and vary by province and by tax. Multiply that litre count by whatever the pump says rather than converting the dollar total, which folds in a US price assumption you probably do not want. The consumption behind it is a US fleet average, published with everything else under fuel cost assumptions.
One limitation worth stating plainly: the place dataset behind this site covers Canada far more thinly than the United States, which is why there is no list of towns along the way on this page and why only a small set of Canadian routes exists at all. The reasoning behind that set is on the Canadian routes index. For anything on the US side, the calculator answers any pair of the sixteen thousand American places in the dataset, with the towns on the corridor included.
Estimated road distance
4,175km
2,594 miles
- Drive time
- 41 hr 11 min
- Average speed
- 63 mph
- Fuel cost
- $322
- Fuel used
- 102.1 gal
Driving or flying?
Driving
- Distance
- 2594 mi
- Time behind the wheel
- 41 hr 11 min
- Fuel cost
- $322
- CO₂
- 908 kg
Flying
- Distance in the air
- 2200 mi
- Time in the air
- 4 hr 24 min
- Door to door
- 6 hr 54 min
- CO₂ per passenger
- 528 kg
Flying saves roughly 34 hr 17 min door to door on this route, even after security, boarding and getting to and from the airports. Driving emits about 1.7× more CO₂ than flying it, counting one passenger in the car. Door-to-door flying time assumes 2 hours 30 minutes of airport and ground overhead.
Questions about these numbers
How far is Vancouver, British Columbia from Ottawa?
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Other Canadian routes
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