Index of next occurring record - r

Question

I have a sample dataset of the trajectory of one bike. My objective is to figure out, on average, the amount of time that lapses in between visits to station B.
So far, I have been able to simply order the dataset with:
test[order(test$starttime, decreasing = FALSE),]
and find the row index of where start_station and end_station equal B.
which(test$start_station == 'B')
which(test$end_station == 'B')
The next part is where I run into trouble. In order to calculate the time that lapses in between when the bike is at Station B, we must take the difftime() between where start_station = "B" (bike leaves) and the next occurring record where end_station= "B", even if the record happens to be in the same row (see row 6).
Using the dataset below, we know that the bike spent 510 minutes between 7:30:00 and 16:00:00 outside of Station B, 30 minutes between 18:00:00 and 18:30:00 outside of Station B, and 210 minutes between 19:00:00 and 22:30:00 outside of Station B, which averages to 250 minutes.
How would one reproduce this output in R using difftime()?
> test
bikeid start_station starttime end_station endtime
1 1 A 2017-09-25 01:00:00 B 2017-09-25 01:30:00
2 1 B 2017-09-25 07:30:00 C 2017-09-25 08:00:00
3 1 C 2017-09-25 10:00:00 A 2017-09-25 10:30:00
4 1 A 2017-09-25 13:00:00 C 2017-09-25 13:30:00
5 1 C 2017-09-25 15:30:00 B 2017-09-25 16:00:00
6 1 B 2017-09-25 18:00:00 B 2017-09-25 18:30:00
7 1 B 2017-09-25 19:00:00 A 2017-09-25 19:30:00
8 1 А 2017-09-25 20:00:00 C 2017-09-25 20:30:00
9 1 C 2017-09-25 22:00:00 B 2017-09-25 22:30:00
10 1 B 2017-09-25 23:00:00 C 2017-09-25 23:30:00
Here is the sample data:
> dput(test)
structure(list(bikeid = c(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1), start_station = c("A",
"B", "C", "A", "C", "B", "B", "А", "C", "B"), starttime = structure(c(1506315600,
1506339000, 1506348000, 1506358800, 1506367800, 1506376800, 1506380400,
1506384000, 1506391200, 1506394800), class = c("POSIXct", "POSIXt"
), tzone = ""), end_station = c("B", "C", "A", "C", "B", "B",
"A", "C", "B", "C"), endtime = structure(c(1506317400, 1506340800,
1506349800, 1506360600, 1506369600, 1506378600, 1506382200, 1506385800,
1506393000, 1506396600), class = c("POSIXct", "POSIXt"), tzone = "")), .Names = c("bikeid",
"start_station", "starttime", "end_station", "endtime"), row.names = c(NA,
-10L), class = "data.frame")

Answer 1

This will calculate the difference as asked in the order it occurs, but does not append it to the data.frame
lapply(df1$starttime[df1$start_station == "B"], function(x, et) difftime(et[x < et][1], x, units = "mins"), et = df1$endtime[df1$end_station == "B"])
[[1]]
Time difference of 510 mins
[[2]]
Time difference of 30 mins
[[3]]
Time difference of 210 mins
[[4]]
Time difference of NA mins
To calculate the average time:
v1 <- sapply(df1$starttime[df1$start_station == "B"], function(x, et) difftime(et[x < et][1], x, units = "mins"), et = df1$endtime[df1$end_station == "B"])
mean(v1, na.rm = TRUE)
[1] 250

Answer 2

Another possibility:
library(data.table)
d <- setDT(test)[ , {
start = starttime[start_station == "B"]
end = endtime[end_station == "B"]
.(start = start, end = end, duration = difftime(end, start, units = "min"))
}
, by = .(trip = cumsum(start_station == "B"))]
d
# trip start end duration
# 1: 0 <NA> 2017-09-25 01:30:00 NA mins
# 2: 1 2017-09-25 07:30:00 2017-09-25 16:00:00 510 mins
# 3: 2 2017-09-25 18:00:00 2017-09-25 18:30:00 30 mins
# 4: 3 2017-09-25 19:00:00 2017-09-25 22:30:00 210 mins
# 5: 4 2017-09-25 23:00:00 <NA> NA mins
d[ , mean(duration, na.rm = TRUE)]
# Time difference of 250 mins
# or
d[ , mean(as.integer(duration), na.rm = TRUE)]
# [1] 250
The data is grouped by a counter which increases by 1 each time a bike starts from "B" (by = cumsum(start_station == "B")).