The New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) - the largest department of its kind in the world - is responsible for the city’s garbage-collection operation. One component of this operation is the regular emptying of 23,000+ street-level trashcans - or as they call them: “litter baskets.” DSNY offers up their geo-coded litter-basket inventory - refreshed monthly - through the NYC OpenData portal and in today’s post I’ll walk through how to create an interactive, 3D fly-over map of these litter-basket locations with the help of Mapbox’s Mapbox GL JS API in R.

In today’s post I am going to go through the steps needed to get RStudio up-and-running in the cloud using Amazon’s free-tier EC2 services, Docker, and rocker/tidyverse (free-tier setups can still result in expenses so please read the documentation carefully!). If you’ve never done anything with AWS before, the first thing you’ll need to do is create and activate an AWS account. After that, as long as you’ve got RStudio, Git BASH, and a Win 10 PC, the remainder of the instructions should work without issue.