Choose constant speed or constant acceleration, then enter the known values to calculate distance traveled.
How to Use the Distance Calculator
Switch between Constant Speed and Constant Acceleration at the top. Constant Speed just needs a speed and a time; Constant Acceleration adds an initial velocity (leave it at 0 for something starting from rest) and an acceleration value, and breaks the total distance into its two components underneath the main result.
This is the kinematics version of a "distance calculator," not the coordinate-geometry one — it answers "how far did something travel, given how fast it was going and for how long," not "how far apart are two points on a graph." If you're after distance between coordinates, that's a different tool.
Constant Speed
distance = speed × timePlain multiplication, valid only while speed genuinely doesn't change over the interval — a car holding a steady 60 mph on the highway, not one accelerating out of a stoplight.
Constant Acceleration
distance = v₀t + ½at²The two terms mean different things, which is why the widget shows them separately. v₀t is how far the object would travel if it just kept its starting speed the whole time, with no speeding up or slowing down. ½at² is the extra distance covered purely because it was accelerating — positive acceleration adds distance on top of the constant-speed term, negative acceleration subtracts from it.
Free fall is the textbook case: drop something from rest, so v₀ = 0 and the entire distance comes from the acceleration term alone, with a = 9.8 m/s² near Earth's surface. That's the formula behind the familiar fact that a falling object covers far more distance in its second second of falling than its first — it isn't moving at a constant speed, it's still speeding up the whole way down.
One thing to get right: units need to match across every field. This calculator assumes meters, seconds, and meters-per-second (squared, for acceleration) — mixing in miles or minutes without converting first produces a technically-computed number that doesn't correspond to any real distance.