GitHub Actions is a powerful tool for building code, running tests & other repetitive tasks related to software development. It’s also a powerful, if somewhat underutilized tool for deploying web scrapers written in R to the internet and automatically publishing a version-controlled copy of the scraped data using GitHub.

In this post I will introduce njtr1, my new R package that makes it easier to research road safety in New Jersey using open data released by the New Jersey Department of Transportation with a consistent and simple API, eliminating the manual drudgery currently inherent in working with these data.

In this post I will explore how New Jersey compares to neighboring states in terms of the granularity, format and accessibility of raw data about COVID-19 cases and deaths made available to the public during the pandemic’s outbreak in 2020.