Rapid urban expansion and dramatic changes in the landscape have been recently witnessed in some developing areas due to the rapid growth of urbanization. Measurement and monitoring of land use changes in such areas are vital to policymakers, who immediately need current information for development and management purposes. Two major cities from Uttarakhand state are considered as study area, one is Dehradun, also known as the Satellite Town, and the other is Haldwani, known as the Gateway of Kumaun. The objective of the study was to visualize the direction pattern of increasing urbanization, direction-wise urban sprawl expansion, and spatio-temporal change of Land Use Land Cover (LULC) over a decade (2013–2023). Satellite images of Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 are used in this study to know about the LULC of these two cities through a machine learning algorithm of supervised classification method. The distance and direction model has been employed to calculate the temporal changes of urban sprawl and urban growth patterns of these cities. The authors found that Dehradun’s urban sprawl expanded toward the northeast (Rajpur and Mussoorie Roads), southeast (Haridwar and Saharanpur Roads), and southwest (Shimla Bypass Road) due to Infrastructure improvements, such as NH 72 and NH 307. Haldwani’s urban expansion primarily occurred in the southern and western directions due factors Geographic constraints, such as hilly terrain, dense forests, and the Gaula River.