You spend a fair chunk of your life getting to work. A racing pigeon could do the same trip and be home in time for tea. Put in where you live, where you work and how long it takes you, and we’ll race you against a pigeon. Then you can share the result, or quietly close the tab.
Example time: 66 minutes is the UK average one-way rail commute (131 minutes a day there and back, TUC (opens in new tab)). Swap in your own.
How it works
- We look up the coordinates of your two places. Towns and cities come from a list built into the page (GeoNames (opens in new tab), CC BY 4.0). UK postcodes are looked up with postcodes.io (opens in new tab), which is free and needs no account. Nothing else you type leaves your browser.
- We work out the straight-line distance with the haversine formula, using a mean Earth radius of 6,371 km (Movable Type Scripts (opens in new tab)). Pigeons fly more or less in a straight line, which is the whole point of them.
- Pigeon time = distance ÷ speed. At the default 50 mph a pigeon covers a mile in 72 seconds.
- We compare that with the commute time you entered. We don’t guess your journey time, because you know it far better than we do.
The share link carries your result in the web address (after the #), so whoever opens it sees your race. It isn’t stored anywhere on our side.
Is 50 mph fair?
Racing pigeons are timed in yards per minute (ypm), and speed depends heavily on wind. Some real figures:
- The 2025 National Flying Club race from Nort-sur-Erdre was won at 1,462.406 ypm over 293 miles, which is about 49.9 mph (NFC race report (opens in new tab)).
- The 2025 NFC race from Sigogne, a harder day, was won at 1,266.161 ypm over 398 miles, about 43.2 mph (NFC race report (opens in new tab)).
- Wikipedia puts the average speed of homing pigeons over 600 miles at around 60 mph, and higher for top birds over short distances (Homing pigeon (opens in new tab)).
So we use 50 mph by default and let you pick 43 or 60. We also give the pigeon a couple of breaks it wouldn’t get in a real race: no wind, and it sets off from your front door. A real bird also has to circle and find its bearings first. Your journey follows roads and rails, so it’s always longer than the straight line. That’s rather the joke.
If you keep pigeons and want the proper maths for race results, use our pigeon velocity calculator.
Commuters vs pigeons: the numbers
These are worked out on the page from published figures, with the pigeon at 50 mph. Journalists are welcome to quote them with a link to this page.
| Region | Average one-way commute (min) | Pigeon distance (miles / km) |
|---|
Sources: commute times are TUC analyses of the ONS Labour Force Survey. Overall and regional figures are for 2018 (TUC, 2019 (opens in new tab)), and figures by type of transport are for 2017 (TUC, 2018 (opens in new tab)). TUC gives round trips, so we halve them. Trip length is from the DfT National Travel Survey 2024 (opens in new tab) (England): 1,007 commuting miles ÷ 111 commuting trips per person. Note that trip length is measured along the route, while the pigeon flies in a straight line, and the years differ, so treat the comparisons as a bit of fun with real numbers behind them.
Questions
Can a pigeon really carry a message to my office?
Only one way. A homing pigeon flies back to its own loft, so it would have to live at your office and be driven to your house every morning. You’d end up commuting for it.
Why is my place not in the list?
The built-in list has UK places with at least 1,000 people. If yours is missing, use your postcode, or type the coordinates as “51.45, -0.97”.
Is anything I type saved?
No. The race runs in your browser. Only a postcode is sent to postcodes.io to get its coordinates.
More to play with: the pigeon quiz, how fast pigeons fly and how far a homing pigeon can fly.