Exploring transport routes, journey characteristics and postcode networks using R Shiny

Hi all,

Recently I’ve finished work on a project intended to visualise the traffic flow within a subsidised transport service, operated by a Scottish council. This visualisation needed to display variations in traffic flow conditional on factors such as the time of day, day of the week, journey purpose, as well as other criteria. The overall aim here was to explore and identify areas of particular activity, as well as provide some insight into how this transport service might be improved.

Given the richness of the data and the multitude of (potential) influences on traffic volume, I set out to create an interactive R Shiny app. I then demoed the app at an EdinbR meeting. There it sparked a lot of interest and questions, so in the end we decided to make the underlying R code widely available (however without the associated data – which we do not own).

Prior to visualising the data within the Shiny app, it underwent some cleaning and transformations. Afterwards, I used the stplanr package (as well as the GraphHopper routing engine) to create the spatial lines connecting the origins and destinations for each unique journey. After these preliminary steps (which are not part of the code linked below), I was able to move on to creating the Shiny app itself.

Please note that, in the absence of the original data, and having removed/modified certain lines of code, the script will not run as is. Rather, it is intended to help you see the structure of a Shiny app, which you can adapt for your own purposes if you please cite this work as:

Constantinescu, A.C. (2018, June). Exploring transport routes, journey characteristics and postcode networks using R Shiny [R script as GitHub Gist]. Edinburgh, Scotland: The Data Lab Innovation Centre. Retrieved [Month] [Day], [Year], from https ://gist.github.com/CaterinaC/4fdfe9bfd753dd47bdec16ca342c401b

The app would look roughly like this (by the way, I’ve either blurred or deleted information that doesn’t belong to me):

 

Hope this is of use! Remember you can always get in touch below if you have questions or suggestions.