A map of elevators in NYC
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Not too long ago, I came across a random tweet pointing to a GitHub repository full of miscallaneous datasets. I was imemdiately excited by the various data science and visualization problems tha I could take on and immediately decided to get my hands dirty. One of the first datasets that I saw was a dataset called eleavtors
. As stated on the github repo, it contains
A list of registered elevator devices in New York City provided by the Department of Buildings in response to a September 2015 FOIL request. The data was received on a DVD in November 2015. The spreadsheet contains information on 76,088 elevators in New York City.
As a resident of NYC, and someone who has mayny times complained abut going to friends houses with no elevators (admittedly a first-world problem…), I wanted to take a look at that data. (Full disclosure, half-way through this little project, I realized that fivethirtyeight had already beaten me to the punch and performed an analysis of its own.
A map of elevators in NYC
The main point of this post is to illustrate how simple it is to produce interactive leaflet map using the leaflet
and htmlwidgets
package in R
. in fact, it is only a single line of code to produce the map above, the rest is just processing the data into the correct format. A word of advice when using the leaflet
package at the zipcode level: the library expects 5 digits for all US-based zipcode, while many databases produce zipcodes that sometimes contain 4 digits. If that happens, it is necessary to pad “0”s to the zipcode until the string in question has a length of five. This can be achieved using a neat little trick that is shown in line 11 of the code below!
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