The R-tree is a well-known bounding-volume hierarchy that
is suitable for storing geometric data on secondary memory. Unfortu-
nately, no good analysis of its query time exists. We describe a new algo-
rithm to construct an R-tree for a set of planar objects that has provably
good query complexity for point location queries and range queries with
ranges of small width. For certain important special cases, our bounds
are optimal. We also show how to update the structure dynamically, and
we generalize our results to higher-dimensional spaces