How far to the coast or a border?

Distance to the coast is the straight line from your point to the nearest point on a mapped coastline. Not the nearest beach you can drive to, and not a nice swimming spot.

MapGO also tells you where that nearest point is, so you can check the answer on the map instead of trusting a bare number.

The Caspian Sea is called a sea, but it is a lake with no outlet to the ocean. Count it, and Astana or Tashkent would get a 'sea' that ships cannot reach the ocean from.

MapGO's study of cities farthest from the sea leaves the Caspian out for that reason. By that measure Ürümqi, in western China, is the city of over a million people farthest from the sea: about 2,353 km (1,462 miles).

Distance to a border is the straight line to the nearest point on a boundary: a country's, a state's or a county's.

One catch: where a country or state ends at the sea, its nearest 'border' can be the coastline itself. MapGO says so rather than naming a neighbour across the water.