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Computing the Fréchet distance between two polygonal curves takes roughly quadratic time. In this paper, we show that for a special class of curves the Fréchet distance computations become easier. Let [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] be two polygonal curves in [Formula: see text] with [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] vertices, respectively. We prove four results for the case when all edges of both curves are long compared to the Fréchet distance between them: (1) a linear-time algorithm for deciding the Fréchet distance between two curves, (2) an algorithm that computes the Fréchet distance in [Formula: see text] time, (3) a linear-time [Formula: see text]-approximation algorithm, and (4) a data structure that supports [Formula: see text]-time decision queries, where [Formula: see text] is the number of vertices of the query curve and [Formula: see text] the number of vertices of the preprocessed curve.