How Nearby are “Nearby Pokémon” in Pokémon Go?
I’ve been doing research on Pokémon that appear in the Nearby list and how close the Pokémon listed there are to you.
It is understood that the ranking of Pokémon proximity is as follows:
Closer Pokémon are positioned higher and more left, Pokémon farther away are positioned lower and more right, with fewer footprints meaning the Pokémon is closer to you.
However, how close are these Pokémon in actual distance? A few feet? A block away? A few blocks away?
I charted the Pokémon in the vicinity of my approximate location with the help of PokemonGo-Map.
Let’s compare this map with the Nearby list.
The Pokémon listed as closest is a Zubat. If we look at our map, we can see that the closest Zubat is less than a block away, on the corner of 7th and Natoma St.
If we do the same for the other Pokémon listed in Nearby, we get something like this:
The closet Goldeen is actually visible in the environment, so it isn’t listed in Nearby.
The Dodrio on Cleveland St. doesn’t show up in Nearby, nor does the Spearow near the orange circled Rattata. This is likely because these Pokémon were “stale” (i.e. had disappeared from the map) when the Nearby screenshot was taken. It is also possible, especially for the Dodrio, that your orientation influences the Nearby listing, e.g. if you’re facing North, you might see different Nearby Pokémon than if you were facing South.
Using Google Maps, we can calculate approximately how far away these Pokémon are from us and how long it would take to get to them (accounting for buildings etc.).
If we histogram these distances, we can see that on average we would need to walk 0.21 miles or ~4.2 minutes to reach a Pokémon in our Nearby list, the median distance being .2 miles and a median time of 3 minutes.
To reach Pokémon in our Nearby list, we may need to walk for ~3–4 minutes before we finally happen upon it, assuming we walk in the correct direction. This average walking time could be lower for Pokémon that are lower than 3 footprints away.
Using this, we can roughly equate 3 footprint symbols to a 3 minute walk. It seems as if our Nearby Pokémon aren’t quite as nearby as we thought.
