The popularity of location-based services and the need to do real-time processing on them has led to an interest in performing queries on transportation networks, such as finding shortest paths and finding nearest neighbors. The challenge is that these operations involve the computation of distance along a spatial network rather than "as the crow flies." In many applications an estimate of the distance is sufficient, which can be achieved by use of an oracle. An approximate distance oracle is proposed for spatial networks that exploits the coherence between the spatial position of vertices and the network distance between them. Using this observation, a distance oracle is introduced that is able to obtain the -approximate network distance between two vertices of the spatial network. The network distance between every pair of vertices in the spatial network is efficiently represented by adapting the well-separated pair technique to spatial networks. Initially, use is made of a...