Create maps with maptools R package

Baptiste Coulmont explains on his blog how to use the R package maptools. It is based on shapefile files, for example the ones offered by the French geography agency IGN (at départements and communes level). Some additional material like roads and railways are provided by the OpenStreetMap project, here. For the above map, you need to dowload and dezip the files departements.shp.zip and ile-de-france.shp.zip. The red dots correspond to points of interest longitude / latitude, here churches stored in a vector eglises (use e.g. this to geolocalise places of interest). Then run this code from Baptiste’s tutorial

library(maptools)
france<-readShapeSpatial("departements.shp",
  proj4string=CRS("+proj=longlat"))
routesidf<-readShapeLines(
  "ile-de-france.shp/roads.shp",
  proj4string=CRS("+proj=longlat")
  )
trainsidf<-readShapeLines(
  "ile-de-france.shp/railways.shp",
  proj4string=CRS("+proj=longlat")
  )
plot(france,xlim=c(2.2,2.4),ylim=c(48.75,48.95),lwd=2)
plot(routesidf[routesidf$type=="secondary",],add=TRUE,lwd=2,col="lightgray")
plot(routesidf[routesidf$type=="primary",],add=TRUE,lwd=2,col="lightgray")
plot(trainsidf[trainsidf$type=="rail",],add=TRUE,lwd=1,col="burlywood3")
points(eglises$lon,eglises$lat,pch=20,col="red")

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