stplanr paper published

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I am very happy to announce that the paper stplanr: A package for transport planning has been published in The R Journal (Lovelace and Ellison 2018) 🎉.

This is the result of around 3 years of work: it took us (co-author Richard Ellison and me) over a year to get round to writing the paper after the stplanr package was first released on CRAN in November 2015 (see its archive on CRAN for details); it wasn’t until March 2017 that the paper was formally submitted.

After that, it was in the review process for almost 2 years, before finally being published last week.¹ Confusingly, the paper has an official publication date of 2018, despite the second volume of The R Journal in 2018 actually being finished in 2019! See the current issue of The R Journal for all papers in this second 2018 volume. There are some interesting papers in there, not least an explanation of methods for visualising point density by Evangelista and Beskow (2018), and an explanation of another pipe (Mount and Zumel 2018).

Instead of going into the details of what the paper says (see the nicely formatted pdf for that), I’d like to finish this post by saying a big THANK YOU to the editorial team behind The R Journal for such a high standard (better than many expensive journals I might add, The R Journal is volunteer-run to the best of my knowledge), especially Roger Bivand and John Verzani.

Plans are afoot to build on the moment behind stplanr, which originated as a place to store code that I was using to develop the Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT, hosted at www.pct.bike) (Lovelace et al. 2017) and make additional, overdue improvements to the package. For more on that, please head-over to the issue tracker (input welcome) or take a read of the final section of the just-publised paper.

References

Evangelista, Paul F., and David Beskow. 2018. “Geospatial Point Density.” The R Journal.

Lovelace, Robin, and Richard Ellison. 2018. “Stplanr: A Package for Transport Planning.” The R Journal 10 (2): 7–23. https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2018-053.

Lovelace, Robin, Anna Goodman, Rachel Aldred, Nikolai Berkoff, Ali Abbas, and James Woodcock. 2017. “The Propensity to Cycle Tool: An Open Source Online System for Sustainable Transport Planning.” Journal of Transport and Land Use 10 (1). https://doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.2016.862.

Mount, John, and Nina Zumel. 2018. “Dot-Pipe: An S3 Extensible Pipe for R.” The R Journal 10 (2): 309–16.

I should say, that it was not the fault of The R Journal’s editorial team that it took so long to publish the paper: I asked for it to be put on hold while I completed the mammoth task of re-writing dozens of functions to support sf (see the pull request in which the sfr branch was merged into master for the grizzly details). ↩︎

paper | Robin Lovelace

stplanr paper published

References