Calculate distance between LineString and Point in meters

Question

I have LineString and Point, and I want to calculate distance between them in meters:

• line = LINESTRING (7.301606 52.5602366, 7.300065099999999 52.5587741)
• point = POINT (8.02 52.303333)

I use: line.distance(point). I got a distance, but I don't know how to convert to meters or km. I am using geopandas, and I read that unit is CRS. Any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

• as per comments you need to specify the CRS I am using geopandas, and I read that unit is CRS. I assume by this statement you mean WSG84 CRS, which is EPSG:4326
• given limitation of geopandas to have only one geometry column per GeoDataFrame have put LINESTRING and POINT into separate data frames
• project from WSG84 onto UTM CRS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_coordinate_system . This then means co-ordinates are expressed in meters. This will not work if LINESTRING and POINT are in different UTM zones
• then it's exceptionally simple to use https://geopandas.readthedocs.io/en/latest/docs/reference/api/geopandas.GeoSeries.distance.html

import shapely.wkt
import geopandas as gpd

gdfl = gpd.GeoDataFrame(geometry=[shapely.wkt.loads("LINESTRING (7.301606 52.5602366, 7.300065099999999 52.5587741)")], crs="EPSG:4326")
gdfp = gpd.GeoDataFrame(geometry=[shapely.wkt.loads("POINT (8.02 52.303333)")], crs="EPSG:4326")
utm = gdfl.estimate_utm_crs()
gdfl.to_crs(utm).distance(gdfp.to_crs(utm))

output

56592.878178