Compute and map railway density using R

With a total of 67,956 kilometers of railways in 2020 India ranked 4th just behind the United States, China and Russia. While Indian Railways, a statutory body under the Indian Ministry of Railways, manages one of the world's largest rail networks, adjusting for the size of the country reveals that a much smaller portion of the territory is covered in railroads. Using the 2019 official subdistrict boundary data generously provided by superb GIS specialist Justin Elliot Meyers on his rich GitHub page as well as Geofabrik OpenStreetMap data for India, we'll learn how to effortlessly compute the length of railways and land area size for every Indian subdistrict polygon to arrive at railway density, measured as 1 kilometer of railway per 100 square kilometers of land area. And we'll do it programatically in R using 150 lines of code. Once you go through the code, you'll be able to apply it to other spatial lines such as roads or rivers. This code could ultimately inspire you to launch your own projects on, for example, motorway density or river length per population.