In our next MünsteR R-user group meetup on Tuesday, November 20th, 2018, titled Using R to help plan the future of transport, Mark Padgham will provide an overview of several inter-related R packages for analysing urban dynamics.

You can RSVP here: http://meetu.ps/e/F7zDN/w54bW/f

The primary motivation for developing these packages has been their use in Active Transport Futures - a group of researchers and coders striving to aid cities to better plan for futures in which active travel, particularly walking and cycling, plays an increasingly prominent role (lots of open source code at github.com/ATFutures). We will take a close look at the packages “osmdata” and “dodgr”, the first of which imports Open Street Map (OSM) data directly into R, while the second is a very powerful, large-scale routing engine. These two packages enable accurate estimates of densities of different kinds of transport along all individual street segments of a city. The development of these packages has been partly motivated by their use in the Urban Health Agenda of the World Health Organization. We will also demonstrate a few other tools currently being developed for this work, including a brand new package to very easily set up a web server for large amounts of spatial data.

About the speaker:

Mark Padgham has programmed C++ for many years, and started using R as a way to get his code noticed by people, which seems to have worked. Along with several others, he is in the process of establishing Active Transport Futures as a GmbH, and hopes that the company will play a significant role in aiding transitions away from environmentally and socially unsustainable modes of transport.