Download and use Census TIGER/Line shapefiles in R

tigris is an R package that allows users to directly download and use TIGER/Line shapefiles (https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-line.html) from the US Census Bureau.

To install the package from CRAN, issue the following command in R:

install.packages('tigris')

Or, get the development version from GitHub:

devtools::install_github('walkerke/tigris')

In version 0.6:

• You are now able to specify a custom cache directory for your data. To set the cache directory, use the new tigris_cache_dir() function:

library(tigris)
tigris_cache_dir("PATH TO YOUR CUSTOM CACHE DIRECTORY")
# Restart R
options(tigris_use_cache = TRUE)

• tigris now defaults to the 2016 TIGER/Line and cartographic boundary shapefiles.

• Thanks to contributors from Transport Foundry (https://github.com/transportfoundry), tigris now includes some geolocator functions. For example, to find out the Census block ID of a given address:

call_geolocator("2850 S University Dr", "Fort Worth", "TX")

Address (2850 S University Dr Fort Worth TX) returned more than one address match. The first match was returned.
[1] "484391042014000"

• Stay tuned for batch geocoding support in a future release!

To learn how to use the package, I'd recommend the following materials:

• My article in The R Journal, "tigris: An R Package to Access and Work with Geographic Data from the US Census Bureau"
• A webinar I gave with Ari Lamstein on tigris in April 2017

Available datasets:

Please note: cartographic boundary files in tigris are not available for 2011 and 2012.