This project is a tool I created to help solve a problem I was facing in working with some GIS data. The problem was as follows: Given a set of census tracts and street center lines, identify which streets form the boundaries of which tracts and to which side the streets are bounding.
This problem was a bit more work than I had anticipated it would be, but the result does work. If you download the street center lines and census tracts data from the Chicago Data Portal you can run main.R and, after some time, receive an output tracts_bounds.shp file in the Output folder. This file is the same as the input folder, but includes a bounds column that lists all of the streets that bound the tract and which side they were on as a comma separated string.
To run this, you'll need to download street center line and tract shapefiles. The tract shapefile can be any polygon dataset, but the streets data must have identifiers for the street direction and coordinates.
If you just want to find which lines bound a polygon and don't care about the side they bound, you can probably mess with the findBounds.R script in the scripts folder without much hassle.