Vancouver.R

# builds a roadmap of Vancouver, coloured by road suffix
# most of the code taken from github.com/erdavis1/RoadColors

# install the packages, you only need to do this once.
install.packages(c('sf', 'foreign', 'tidyverse', 'lwgeom'))

# load in the necessary libraries
library(sf)
library(foreign)
library(tidyverse)
library(lwgeom)
options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

# set the working directory
# setwd("input/")

# .shp file (without suffix)
# taken from Road Network File - 2010 - British Columbia
# https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/143d136f-3b24-408a-8188-e979cb775852
filename <- "grnf059r10a_e"

# I used latlon.com to pick a bounding box around the city
df<- read.table(text ="lat  lon
49.397373 -123.315913
49.397373 -122.629007
49.036419 -122.629007
49.036419 -123.315913
49.397373 -123.315913",header= T)

#pick the road types you'd like to have colored in the plot
plottypes <-  c('HWY', 'RD', 'AVE', 'ST', 'DR', 'CRES', 'TRAIL', 'LINE')

#set colors for each road type
plotcolors <-  c('HWY' = '#FE4D64', 'RD' = '#4cb580', 'AVE' ='#59c8e5', 'ST' = '#fed032', 'DR' = '#a7abfe', 
                 'CRES' = '#fe9ea5', 'TRAIL' = '#2e968c', 'LINE' = '#ff9223', 'Other' = '#cccccc')

#import  road geography
allroads <- read_sf(".", filename)
allroads$len <- st_length(allroads)

polygon <- df %>% 
  st_as_sf(coords = c("lon", "lat"), crs = 4326) %>% 
  st_transform(32195) %>%
  summarise(geometry = st_combine(geometry)) %>%
  st_cast("POLYGON")

#subset the roads into a sub-boundary. You can remove this if you want to plot the entire province.
boundary <- polygon %>% st_transform(st_crs(allroads))
allroads <- st_intersection(boundary, allroads)

#put other roads into their own dataframe
allroads$TYPE[!(allroads$TYPE %in% plottypes)] <- "Other"
otherroads <- allroads[(allroads$TYPE  == "Other"),]
allroads <- allroads[(allroads$TYPE  != "Other"),]

#plot it
blankbg <-theme(axis.line=element_blank(),axis.text.x=element_blank(),
                axis.text.y=element_blank(),axis.ticks=element_blank(),
                axis.title.x=element_blank(), axis.title.y=element_blank(),
                panel.background=element_blank(),panel.border=element_blank(),panel.grid.major=element_blank(),
                panel.grid.minor=element_blank(),plot.background=element_blank())

#depending on the city/radius you're mapping you might need to adjust the size variables below.
#I just do trial/error till I like the way it looks when it's saved
ggplot() + blankbg + theme(panel.grid.major = element_line(colour = "transparent")) + 
  geom_sf(data=otherroads, size = .5, aes(color=TYPE)) + 
  geom_sf(data=allroads, size = .5, aes(color=TYPE)) + 
  scale_color_manual(values = plotcolors, guide = FALSE) 

ggsave("myplot.png", plot = last_plot(), scale = 1, width = 18, height = 36, units = "in", dpi = 500)

Preview of the result