# traveltime: an R package to calculate travel time across a landscape from user-specified locations

## TL;DR

The traveltime R package calculates travel time across a landscape from specified locations, aiding in urban planning and public health applications.

## Contribution

A new R package for calculating travel time from user-specified locations using a friction surface.

## Key findings

- The package generates a raster map showing the lowest travel time to the nearest specified location.
- Applications include estimating sampling bias and optimizing health district allocations.
- The workflow involves preparing a friction surface and calculating travel times.

## Abstract

Understanding and mapping the time to travel among locations is useful for many activities from urban planning to public health and myriad others. Here we present a software package —
traveltime — written in and for the language R.
traveltime enables a user to create a raster map of the travel time over an area of interest from a user-specified set of locations defined by geographic coordinates. The result is a raster of the area of interest where the value in each cell is the lowest travel time in minutes to the nearest of the supplied locations. We envisage this software having diverse applications including: estimating sampling bias, allocating defibrillators, setting health districts, or mapping access to vehicle chargers and agricultural facilities. The work-flow requires two key steps: preparing a friction surface for the area of interest, and then calculating travel time over that surface for the points of interest.
traveltime is available from
R-Universe and
GitHub, and documented at
https://idem-lab.github.io/traveltime/.