1 The Idea

Since I was interested in doing a traffic-related study of India, I wanted to know more about the general characteristics of Indian roads - particularly at the state/UT level. I am also mentoring a student for a brief internship (bright kid with great potential!), and wanted to introduce him to some spatial data handling in R, since he was interested in learning some data analysis.

Fortunately, DIVA-GIS provides us with geospatial data of administrative boundaries and roads for free (all in one easily accessible website - pretty awesome!).

To implement this idea, I will be providing a brief walkthrough to geospatially aggregating (or geoaggregating) roads by state/Union Territory (UT). The aggregation will involve some spatial intersections, and polyline length/vertex extractions. For the sake of time (as it may be redundant and computationally expensive to process all the states/UTs for this walkthrough), we will play around with one state, but initially look at the entire dataset.