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How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

andrewheiss.com

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Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#81
post #63
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-cartographer, but someone who loves maps (who doesnt?) and programming is there anything in particular that makes R more suitable than Python? Not trying to start a Python/R flame war, genuinely curious as an outsider if there's some secret sauce that R has but which Python lacks.

The secret sauce for R is that their statistical models/packages are cutting-edge, they have the best plotting library (ggplot2), and they have the best data wrangling packages (dplyr for tabular data).

very much this. I've spent years dabbling with other languages, nothing as ever been as clean as the tidyverse for data analysis

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#82
post #68

Really informative post on how to do this "by hand"! I use https://trips.furkot.com (which is free ) for this kind of trip planning. It is fantastic to determine how much stuff you can fit in a day, taking into account when you want to start/end your day, driving time, stops for food, time spent at any road-side attractions, overnight stays, ticketed events (to ensure you arrive on time), etc. It's an incredible reso…

Thanks for this. I've been using Roadtrippers, which is OK but full of intrusive ads even if you pay for the Pro subscription. Furkot looks much better.

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#83

Why is there such a movement for making maps with R? The python ecosystem has more and better packages for making maps already. Notwithstanding that there are indeed some nice results, this new R toolchain movement towards maps feels like a waste of open source energy to me.

There are a lot of R users and it's a nice language you should try it sometimes.

As an R user for nearly 15 years at this point: R isn't nice, it's an awful language, but it is very useful.

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#84

Why is there such a movement for making maps with R? The python ecosystem has more and better packages for making maps already. Notwithstanding that there are indeed some nice results, this new R toolchain movement towards maps feels like a waste of open source energy to me.

while I use Python far more than R (or Julia) I don't think that this is a particularly constructive comment.

"More and better" is simply subjective and not substantiated. In fact detailed and objective comparisons of capabilities, performance etc between these ecosystems are sorely lacking not just in map-making but practially concerning every comparison.

Still, the "waste of open source energy argument" is quite bit more complex and I'm frequently wondering about this.

For sure this "waste" happens everywhere in open source. About the only thing that approaches some optimal level of efficiency is the Linux kernel. From there on, distributions, desktops, toolchains, apps, libraries etc. is the epitomy of chaos.

This diversity creates resilience and a sort of competition for the survival of the fittest. The openness also facilitates fast diffusion and borrowing good ideas. But it is also true that open source resources are still scarce so development happens at maybe much lower speed than what would be possible if more coordination / less fragmentation was practiced.

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#85
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If seeing a pretty innocuous comment triggers this kind of response, then you might need to take a breather from the comments. Or click the `[-]` button to hide the reply if you don't want to. But engaging like this is about as productive as having an argument with a brick wall, it's not doing you any good.

I appreciate everybody's totally genuine concern about my mental health. May I suggest though that you do you and I do me? Take your own advice and follow it. I will continue to post what I think when I think. Over and out.

The comment that set you off did not comment on political ideologies, political actions, or political stories of the day. There's nothing in there about rightness, wrongness, justice, etc. No candidates were discussed, nobody was attacked, no divisiveness instigated. The commenter merely shared a project with obvious similarities to the posted subject derived from political voting patterns. The route is likely aligned to their values, but even that is an inference!

When everyone around you seemingly makes everything political, maybe it's sometimes the observer and not the observed?

> I appreciate everybody's totally genuine concern about my mental health.

It's probably more genuine than you think, however hard that is to believe.

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#86
This reminds me of a Bing (MSN?) maps plug-in a while ago that was built by, I think, an Indian guy who went over to MS, which would plot a summarized route map from point A to point B where the main roads in your route were labeled, esp where you had to turn or get on a diff road. This was before phones with GPS came about.

The roads looked somehwat like chicken scratch (straight, not many curves). Like if you were mapping directions in sand/dirt with a stick in explaining to someone how to get some place.

Ah, yes, it was Linedrive: https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/remember...

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#88

The only thing I don't like about OSRM (the public facing version, not sure if the Docker one has this limitation) is that the route planning is limited in the number of waypoints. I'm planning a trip to the west coast and have 50 POIs (coordinates) collected from Wanderlog that I want to visit. I just run a small TSP algorithm over that list and have an ordered collection of points for which I want to calculate the…

That’s the public instance. It’s a runtime flag to osrm-routed so if you set up your own instance, you can configure it how you like. (Or use the Node or upcoming Python bindings.)

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#89
We did a several thousand mile road trip a couple years ago. We planned it out using various online tools and pen and paper. Will have to look into doing something like this the next time.

The kiddos got to see a LOT of really cool things. They had a blast.

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