tinytiger is to provide a lightweight interface to the US Census Bureau’s TIGER/Line Shapefiles. It has four dependencies other than sf. Download caching is supported; see below for details.

Installation

Install tinytiger from CRAN with:

install.packages("tinytiger")

You can also install the development version of tinytiger:

remotes::install_github("alarm-redist/tinytiger")

Example

tinytiger provides lightweight functions to download Census Bureau TIGER/Line Shapefiles. To download a geography, simply use the function corresponding to one of the supported geographies.

library(tinytiger)

tt_counties("NY")
#> Simple feature collection with 62 features and 17 fields
#> Geometry type: MULTIPOLYGON
#> Dimension:     XY
#> Bounding box:  xmin: -79.76259 ymin: 40.47658 xmax: -71.77749 ymax: 45.01586
#> Geodetic CRS:  NAD83
#> # A tibble: 62 × 18
#>    STATEFP COUNTYFP COUNT…¹ GEOID NAME  NAMEL…² LSAD  CLASSFP MTFCC CSAFP CBSAFP
#>  * <chr>   <chr>    <chr>   <chr> <chr> <chr>   <chr> <chr>   <chr> <chr> <chr> 
#>  1 36      101      009741… 36101 Steu… Steube… 06    H1      G4020 236   18500 
#>  2 36      091      009741… 36091 Sara… Sarato… 06    H1      G4020 104   10580 
#>  3 36      003      009741… 36003 Alle… Allega… 06    H1      G4020 <NA>  <NA>  
#>  4 36      075      009741… 36075 Oswe… Oswego… 06    H1      G4020 532   45060 
#>  5 36      111      009741… 36111 Ulst… Ulster… 06    H1      G4020 408   28740 
#>  6 36      089      009773… 36089 St. … St. La… 06    H1      G4020 <NA>  36300 
#>  7 36      097      009741… 36097 Schu… Schuyl… 06    H1      G4020 <NA>  <NA>  
#>  8 36      031      009741… 36031 Essex Essex … 06    H1      G4020 <NA>  <NA>  
#>  9 36      103      009741… 36103 Suff… Suffol… 06    H1      G4020 408   35620 
#> 10 36      041      009741… 36041 Hami… Hamilt… 06    H1      G4020 <NA>  <NA>  
#> # … with 52 more rows, 7 more variables: METDIVFP <chr>, FUNCSTAT <chr>,
#> #   ALAND <dbl>, AWATER <dbl>, INTPTLAT <chr>, INTPTLON <chr>,
#> #   geometry <MULTIPOLYGON [°]>, and abbreviated variable names ¹COUNTYNS,
#> #   ²NAMELSAD

Supported Geographies

tt_address_ranges(): Address Ranges
tt_ai_an_nh_areas(): American Indian / Alaska Native / Native Hawaiian Areas
tt_tribal_subdivisions(): Tribal Subdivisions
tt_anrc(): Alaskan Native Regional Corporations
tt_area_landmarks(): Area Landmarks
tt_area_water(): Area Water
tt_block_groups(): Block Groups
tt_cbsa(): Core Based Statistical Areas
tt_congressional_districts(): Congressional Districts
tt_new_england_combined_areas(): Combined New England Towns and Cities
tt_coastline(): Coastline
tt_consolidated_cities(): Consolidated Cities
tt_counties(): Counties
tt_county_subdivisions(): County Subdivisions
tt_csa(): Combined Statistical Areas
tt_polygon_edges(): All Polygon Edges
tt_elementary_school_districts(): Elementary School Districts (limited states)
tt_estates(): Estates (Virgin Islands only)
tt_polygon_faces(): All Polygon Faces
tt_linear_water(): Linear Water
tt_metropolitan_divisions(): Metropolitan Divisions
tt_military(): Military Installations
tt_new_england_cities(): New England Cities and Towns
tt_new_england_city_divisions(): New England Cities and Towns Divisions
tt_places(): Census Places
tt_point_landmarks(): Point Landmarks
tt_primary_roads(): Primary Roads
tt_primary_secondary_roads(): Primary and Secondary Roads
tt_puma(): Public Use Microdata Areas
tt_rails(): Railroads
tt_roads(): Roads
tt_secondary_school_districts(): Secondary School Districts (limited states)
tt_state_leg_lower(): Lower State Legislative Districts
tt_state_leg_upper(): Upper State Legislative Districts
tt_states(): States
tt_subbarrios(): Subbarios (Puerto Rico only)
tt_blocks(): Blocks
tt_tribal_block_groups(): Tribal Block Groups
tt_tracts(): Tracts
tt_tribal_tracts(): Tribal Tracts
tt_uac(): : Urban Areas
tt_unified_school_districts(): Unified School Districts
tt_voting_districts(): Voting Districts
tt_zcta(): Zip Code Tabulation Areas

Downloading and Caching

By default, downloading will print status messages and/or a progress bar. For silent downloads, set options(tinytiger.curl_quiet = TRUE).

Downloads will go to options(tinytiger.cache_dir) if it is set. If it is not, and rappdirs is installed, and options(tinytiger.use_cache = TRUE), downloads will be cached between sessions in rappdirs::user_cache_dir("tinytiger"). If it is not installed, or if options(tinytiger.use_cache = FALSE), then the cache will be in a temporary directory that does not persist between sessions. You can check the size of the cache and clear it with tt_cache_size() and tt_cache_clear().