NEWS.md

In otpr: An R Wrapper for the 'OpenTripPlanner' REST API

otpr 0.5.1.9000 (Development)

otpr 0.5.1

Bug fixes

• Check that API call to evaluate surface actually returns some results. If not return error message - most likely cause is that the pointset coordinates are not within the area covered by the surface (e.g. could be the wrong pointset specified or latitude and longitude are the wrong way around).

otpr 0.5.0

New Features

• Support for creating and evaluating surfaces in OTPv1. The OTP surfaces endpoint enables efficient running of one-to-many queries. Once a surface for an origin has been generated (a surface is specific to a transport mode, date, time etc.), distances from that origin to a set of locations (or 'opportunities') can be generated very quickly - many thousands in a few seconds. In addition, one or more indicators of accessibility for those opportunities can be generated at the same time. For example, if the opportunity was census workplace zones, a count of the number of zones and the number of jobs accessible from the origin at one-minute intervals are returned, along with a cumulative sum, enabling a rapid assessment of the number of job opportunities within, say, 30 minutes. There are two new functions to support surfaces:
  • otp_create_surface() creates a surface stored in memory on the OTP server and returns its Id number. It can optionally also retrieve and save a raster file (geoTIFF) of the surface for visualisation in R (or other GIS).
  • otp_evaluate_surface() uses an existing surface and a pointset (loaded from a CSV file provided to OTP at server startup) to calculate the travel time to each point location in the pointset file and to generate accessibility indicators for one or more 'opportunity' columns. A list is returned containing a dataframe for each 'opportunity' and, optionally, a dataframe of the time taken to travel from the surface's origin to each location point. This function can also be used to retrieve the time from an origin to many destinations.
• Support for OTPv2. Some issues to be aware of (due to OTPv2 implementation not otpr):
  • currently, due to a bug in OTPv2, for TRANSIT modes a sub-optimal walk-only trip may be returned as the top itinerary. See: https://github.com/opentripplanner/OpenTripPlanner/issues/3289 for a discussion of this issue. This can be mitigated by using the maxWalkDistance parameter (but see below).
  • maxWalkDistance is a hard limit in OTPv2. This is a soft limit in OTPv1 and is effectively ignored if the mode is WALK only. In OTPv2 this parameter imposes a hard limit for WALK, CAR and BICYCLE modes. see: http://docs.opentripplanner.org/en/latest/OTP2-MigrationGuide/#router-config.
• Multiple trip itineraries are now supported by the otp_get_times() function and specified using the MaxItineraries argument.
• The waitReluctance argument has been added to otp_get_times(), otp_get_isochrone() and otp_get_surface() functions.
• For advanced users: the ability to pass any additional OTP API parameter not specified in the otpr functions to the OTP API via an extra.params argument. Available in otp_get_times(), otp_get_isochrone() and otp_get_surface(). Note that no validation of these additional parameters will be carried out by otpr. They will be passed directly to the OTP API.
• Now additionally imports dplyr and rrapply.

Breaking changes

• As part of the support for multiple itineraries, trip legs are now returned by otp_get_times() as a nested dataframe within the itineraries dataframe, rather than as a separate list element.
• The default value for maxWalkDistance (used in otp_get_times(), otp_get_isochrone() and otp_create_surface()) has been changed from 800 to NULL. This means that the internal OTP default of unlimited is applied. This has been implemented due to the impact of this parameter in OTPv2 (see above). It is now necessary to make a conscious decision on whether to set this parameter and to what value. The default value of 800 that was previously set by otpr was different from the OTP default (which is unlimited) and so this change corrects that anomaly.

Bug fixes

• A single numeric value is now accepted for the walkReluctance parameter - this was incorrectly restricted to an integer.

otpr 0.4.2

New Features

• otp_get_distance(), otp_get_times() and otp_get_isochrone() now also return the query URL that was submitted to the OTP API. This is for user reference and can be useful for troubleshooting.

• Now also imports urltools, used to return decoded query URL.

Other

• Test coverage greatly extended.

otpr 0.4.1

Behaviour change

• otp_get_times() now returns a legs datafame, when requested, for WALK, BICYCLE and CAR modes. For these modes this will contain a single leg. This is for consistency with other modes.

Bug fixes

• Since 0.4.0 some parameters (walkReluctance, arriveBy, transferPenalty and minTransferTime) were not being passed to the OTP API by the otp_get_times() function. This has been fixed.

• There were instances when otp_get_times() would generate an error when journey legs were requested. This was due to an expected attribute in the OTP API response not being present. There is some inconsistency in the columns that are returned by OTP for the legs, dependent on the mode, and what values appear in the original GTFS feeds. Rather than limit the leg detail to the smaller subset of columns that are guaranteed to be present, the function now includes columns in the legs dataframe for the attributes that are present (as well as additional otpr calculated columns). This could mean some inconsistency in the columns returned in the legs dataframe between queries. If you make use of these extra columns in post-processing then you may need additional code to check for column existence.

otpr 0.4.0

Experimental feature

• Support for OTP version 2 (experimental). As OTPv2 has not yet been released changes to its codebase could cause errors in otpr or unexpected behaviour when used against an OTPv2 instance. This version was tested against commit cce4e7ea. Please report any problems in Issues. Current known issues:
  • otp_get_isochrone() is only supported in OTPv1 as this feature has been removed from OTPv2.
  • The maxWalkDistance parameter used in the otp_get_times() function is treated as a hard limit when the mode is either WALK or BICYCLE. This could result in no itinerary being returned as the default is 800m. This is different from the behaviour of OTPv1 where this parameter is effectively ignored when the mode is WALK and not applied at all to BICYCLE trips. Workaround: provide a large value to this parameter for these modes.
  • The 'routeType' and 'agencyUrl' columns do not appear in the data frame of journey legs as these are not returned by OTPv2.

Deprecated arguments

• otp_connect() no longer uses the optional check argument. The function will now always check that the OTP server and specified router are reachable. This is because the version of OTP must now be retrieved from the ../otp endpoint so that otpr can support OTP versions 1 and 2.

Other

• Compatibility with R 4.0.0. Note: R 4.0.0 requires reinstallation of all packages on your system. In particular, make sure that you have re-installed curl, as otp_connect() can appear to fail without the reason - that curl has not been installed after 4.0.0 - being explicitly reported.
• otp_connect() now retrieves the version of the OTP server. This is contained in the otpconnect object that is returned and reported to the user. Note that OTPv2 does not support named or multiple routers.
• Now also imports the sf package. The st_make_valid() function is used in otp_get_isochrone() to correct any geometry errors in the sf object before it is returned to the user. OTP appears to return polygons that fail validation by st_is_valid from the sf package.

otpr 0.3.0

New features

• Added option to request information about each of the legs in a returned transit itinerary. There is a new parameter available for otp_get_times() called includeLegs. If this is set to TRUE (default is FALSE) and detail is also set to TRUE and mode includes a transit mode, then the list returned by the function will contain a third element: a dataframe called legs. This consists of a row for each leg of the trip. Information provided includes departureWait which is the length of time in minutes required to wait for the start of a leg.

• Added support for time zones (#7). The OTP API returns itinerary start and end times as EPOCH values. otpr converts these to hh:mm:ss format using the as.POSIXct() function. Previously, a time zone argument was not provided to this function. As a result as.POSIXct() assumed the time zone to be the current time zone of the local system. When the local system time zone is the same as the time zone of the router's graph then there will be no confusion. However, if the time zone of the graph is different from the time zone of the local system then the start and end times will be expressed in the local system time zone and not the time zone of the graph. To address this the following changes have been made:

  • Added a tz argument to the otp_connect() function. By default this is set to the local system's time zone. If the router's graph is in a different time zone the user can specify it (for example, "Europe/Berlin").
  • The dataframe returned by otp_get_times() when the detail argument is set to TRUE now includes an additional 'time zone' column. This shows the time zone of the returned itinerary start and end times. This makes explicit what time zone these times are expressed in.

otpr 0.2.0

New features

• Added option to otp_get_isochrone() to return isochrone as either GeoJSON (default) or as a simple feature collection (sf). Specified using the new format argument (#4)

• Now also imports geojsonsf, used in otp_get_isochrone()

Bug fixes

• The unit of time returned by otp_get_times() was inconsistent. When the 'detail' parameter was set to TRUE the time was returned in seconds; otherwise the time was returned in minutes. This has been corrected so that time is always returned in minutes (#3).

• Remove 'curl' from 'Imports:' to fix CRAN binary build error on some platforms (#2)

otpr 0.1.0

Initial release.

otpr documentation built on Jan. 7, 2022, 5:26 p.m.