Skip to contents

Read Estimated Travel Time to Major Cities (Year 2000)

Source: R/data_traveltime.R
read_traveltime.Rd

Downloads and reads the global raster dataset of estimated travel time to major cities for the year 2000, as developed by Nelson (2008). The dataset represents travel time in minutes to the nearest major city using multimodal transport networks.

Usage

read_traveltime()

Value

A SpatRaster object

Details

The function:

  • Locates the local travel time dataset using get_pgfile

  • Extracts the zip archive containing the raster files

  • Imports the main .tif file as a SpatRaster object using the terra package

  • Sets the layer name to "travel_time" for clarity

Note

  • The dataset provides estimates based on the transportation network circa 2000

  • Raster extraction is cached locally after the first download

  • Large raster files may take time and memory to process

References

Nelson (2008). “Travel Time to Major Cities: A Global Map of Accessibility.” 2025-05-14.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Load estimated travel time raster
travel_time_raster <- read_traveltime()

# Inspect raster properties
travel_time_raster

# Plot global travel time
terra::plot(travel_time_raster, main = "Estimated Travel Time to Major Cities (2000)")

# Extract travel time for a specific region
africa_extent <- terra::ext(-20, 50, -35, 37)
africa_travel <- terra::crop(travel_time_raster, africa_extent)
terra::plot(africa_travel, main = "Travel Time in Africa")
} # }