Using the rwalkable package

Stuart Lee, Thomas Lumley, Alan Pearse

2018-11-23

rwalkable

We have legs for walking. This is a true fact. Walking for long distances can be painful. This is also a true fact. This package rwalkable eases the pain by exploring the walkability of neighbourhoods.

We make use of osmdata and dodgr packages to estimate walkability metrics such as points of interest per hectare.

Finding amenities that are nearby()

Walkable neighbourhoods have lots of points of interest (amenities) that are within some walkable distance.

Let’s look at points of interest nearby Paris, France and compare them to Paris, Texas, USA

devtools::load_all("../")
#> Loading rwalkable
paris <- nearby("3rd Arrondissement, Paris, France")
paris
#> Within  800  m of 3rd Arrondissement, Paris, France 
#>    7.1 points of interest per hectare
#>    2.2 road branches per hectare

the_other_paris <- nearby("Paris, Texas, USA")
the_other_paris
#> Within  800  m of Paris, Texas, USA 
#>    0 points of interest per hectare
#>    0.4 road branches per hectare

The location can also defined by a vector of longitidue and latitude representing the centre of a neighbourhood.

By default, we consider an distance walkable if it’s within 800m radius of the location.

We can modify this with the radius argument, which takes a walking distance in metres,

nearby("Paris, France", radius = 2000)

or we can estimate all points of interest for a given walking time in minutes

nearby("Paris, France", radius = walk_time(15))

By default all amenities are to be points of interest, this can modified with the amenities argument. Valid amenities can be found on OpenStreetMap

nearby("Paris, France", amenities = "cafe")

We can also make an interactive map of the neighbourhood with the amenities using leaflet. There’s a dropdown menu on the top right hand side of the map to filter amenties that are not interesting out.

Here’s a walkable neighbourhood

plot(paris, overlay_isochrone = TRUE)
#> dist is assumed to be in decimal degrees (arc_degrees).

And a not so walkable neighbourhood

plot(the_other_paris, overlay_isochrone = TRUE)
#> dist is assumed to be in decimal degrees (arc_degrees).