winnipegr

This R package provides an abstraction layer for easily accessing openly available data sets for Winnipeg, MB, Canada.

Installation

In the future, you will be able to install the released version of winnipegr from CRAN with:

install.packages("winnipegr")

But, for now you need to use devtools:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("jdallmann/winnipegr")

Retrieving Data

The package includes the following functions for downloading open data:

• get_weather for sourcing Winnipeg weather from stations from: Winnipeg 'CXWI', Winnipeg Forks 'CXWN', and Winnipeg International Airport 'CYWG'.

• get_WPA_Stations for sourcing available WPA parking station variables such as available_space, hourly_rate, timelimit, location, and others.

• get_open_data a wrapper for calling City of Winnipeg open data (https://data.winnipeg.ca/) using descriptive data set identifiers. The data is provided under the Open Government Licence – Canada. The type parameter takes any valid Winnipeg Open Data identifier code (usually of the form 7cfr-9tgh), to search these use search_open_data. It is also possible to retrieve some data sets using descriptive argument strings, available options include:

DESCRIPTIVE	get_open_data	ARGUMENT STRINGS
"2018 polling geoms"	"park assets"	"transit on-time hist"
"311"	"parking"	"transit pass-ups"
"311 channels"	"parking bans"	"transport mode"
"address coords"	"parking citations"	"trees"
"air quality"	"parks"	"TSI-bases detail trans"
"boundary"	"permit details"	"TSI-cameras detail"
"building permits"	"plow schedule"	"TSI-corridor box indications detail"
"burials"	"population"	"TSI-corridor boxes detail"
"by-law investigations"	"public notices"	"TSI-hardware detail"
"capex"	"river james"	"TSI-heads (displays) detail"
"collection days"	"river levels"	"TSI-locations"
"contravention"	"school enrolments"	"TSI-pole and arms detail"
"council expenses"	"survey parcel"	"TSI-pole and cabinet locations"
"dispositions"	"tax parcels"	"TSI-traffic signal malfunctions"
"fipa requests"	"ticket adjudication results"	"TSI-traffic signal damage"
"lane closures"	"TMC-confirmed incidents"	"waste tonnage"
"mosquito traps"	"transit on-time"	"web analytics"

• get_transit provies a wrapper for making calls to the Winnipeg Transit APIs, and flattens the result into a tidy dataframe. Requires an API key available from https://api.winnipegtransit.com/home/api/v3. Currently available API type options include:
  • "stops" for returning stops near a specified location

The package also contains internal fixed data sets. Load these data sets in the usual way data(transport_mode). Currently included data sets:

• transport_mode Mode of transportation data from Statistics Canada's 2016 Census. (See: City of Winnipeg open data.)
• census_commute_2019 Census commute data from Statistics Canada for Winnipeg CMA 2019 at the DA level. Downloaded using von Bergmann, Shkolnik and Jacobs's cancensus package v0.2.0 on 2019-10-01.
• wpg_electoral_wards_2018 Winnipeg electoral wards following 2018 election with shapefile geometries.
• neighbourhoods_2017 Boundaries of neighbourhood characterization areas (aka NCA) used to delineate neighbourhoods for city planning purposes.
• active_trans_ntwk_2019 Boundaries and data for Winnipeg's active transport cycling network.
• census_demo_2019 Data for key Winnipeg demographics information (100% data and total data from Statistics Canada). Data is at the finest geographical resolution (Dissemination Area---DA) available. Admittedly not complete, and based on variables of interest in my work. Downloaded using von Bergmann, Shkolnik and Jacobs' cancensus package v0.2.0 on 2019-10-01.
• census_DA_2019 Boundary shape file with id for Statistics Canada 2019 DA data. Downloaded using von Bergmann, Shkolnik and Jacobs' cancensus package v0.2.0 on 2019-10-01.
• crime_aug_2019 Winnipeg police crime statistics pulled on 2019-12-02 from here.
• yrly_crime_2018 Statistics Canada. Table 35-10-0181-01 Incident-based crime statistics, by detailed violations, police services in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Pulled on 2019-12-02 from DOI: https://doi.org/10.25318/3510018101-eng.
• mbnc Municipal Benchmarking Network Canada (MBNC) dataset. Data pulled from mbnc on 2019-12-27.

Examples

get_weather

This function uses the reim package to load Winnipeg weather abstracting station names. Measurements have the option to be converted to metric using the weathermetrics package.

\dontrun{
    get_weather(station = "forks",
        start = '2018-01-01',
        end = '2018-02-28',
        metric = TRUE)
    get_weather(station = "airport",
        start = '2018-01-01')
}

search_open_data

This function uses the jsonlite package to get and search/grep current metadata on the data sets available on the City of Winnipeg Open Data site data.winnipeg.ca. It returns a data frame with descriptions of data, and code to retrieve data sets using get_open_data, or through the open data Socrata API.

\dontrun{
    # Returns all metadata as a data frame
    search_open_data()

    # Examines data sets whose title or description contains 'trees'
    # ignoring case
    search_open_data('trees')

    # Get recently updated data sets
    search_open_data(updated_after = '2019-01-01')

    # Return API short codes for searched data sets
    search_open_data(contains = 'parking')$identifier[1]
}

get_open_data

This function uses the RSocrata package to get Winnipeg City data from the Winnipeg Open Data site data.winnipeg.ca. Users with a City of Winnipeg open data account can also use their login credentials to have full (non-throttled) access to the API.

\dontrun{
    get_open_data("parking", app_token = SOME_API_TOKEN,
                  email = FAKE_EMAIL,
                  password = FAKE_PASSWORD)
    
    get_open_data("river james")
    
    get_open_data(search_open_data("clerk")$identifier[1])
}

get_transit

This function uses the jsonlite package to get Winnipeg City Transit data from the Winnipeg Transit API v3. It also flattens that data from json to a tidy dataframe. Users must have registered for their own (free) API key to use.

\dontrun{
    get_transit(option_vec = c("lat=49.8951",
                "lon=-97.1384", "distance=1000",
                "walking=true", "usage=short"),
                api_key = transit_API)
}