Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Committee Chair

Michael D. Anderson

Committee Member

Avinash Unnikrishnan

Committee Member

Henrick Haule

Committee Member

Ana Wooley

Committee Member

Ashraf Al-Hamdan

Research Advisor

Michael D. Anderson

Subject(s)

Telecommuting--Alabama--Huntsville, Commuting--Alabama--Huntsville, Traffic congestion--Alabama--Huntsville, Traffic estimation--Alabama--Huntsville, Traffic safety--Alabama--Huntsville

Abstract

For over a century, transportation planning has treated commuting demand as essentially fixed, a given that infrastructure must accommodate. The COVID-19 pandemic challenged this assumption by demonstrating, at continental scale, that telework can substantially reduce congestion and improve road safety. Yet no empirical research had examined the reverse: what happens to traffic operations and crash safety when remote work is abruptly eliminated. This dissertation addresses that gap by exploiting the January 2025 federal Return-to-Office mandate, which required over two million civilian employees to resume full-time in-person work, as a natural experiment in the Huntsville, Alabama metropolitan area, a quintessentially auto-dependent region anchored by Redstone Arsenal and its federal workforce. Three complementary studies examine the mandate’s transportation consequences using independent data sources and analytical methods. The first analyzes traffic speed impacts on commuter corridors near Redstone Arsenal, documenting significant speed reductions concentrated at the most capacity-constrained bottleneck locations while less-exposed corridors remained stable, providing informal spatial control evidence against regional confounding. The second analyzes crash safety impacts across Madison County, finding a significant increase in crash frequency during the initial implementation period that returned to baseline as the driving population adapted, with the severity distribution remaining unchanged throughout. Beneath this aggregate pattern, a coherent set of congestion signatures emerged in the crash data, including more multi-vehicle crashes, more intersection conflicts, and more slowing/stopping events, consistent with the density-driven mechanisms predicted by established traffic flow theory. The third study is a policy analysis that examines the operational and safety findings together, tests a symmetry hypothesis, and develops the implications for transportation planning and workforce policy. The evidence confirms that the aggregate volume–speed and exposure–crash relationships operate symmetrically in both directions, but reveals important asymmetries in how the system transitions between states. The operational and safety findings are directionally consistent and mutually reinforcing, with speed reductions explaining the observed severity stability and congestion signatures in the crash data mirroring the density increases documented in the speed data. The findings support the conclusion that in auto-dependent regions, telework functions not as a peripheral workplace amenity but as de facto transportation infrastructure, one that is free, immediate, and, as this work demonstrates, reversible when withdrawn. The dissertation concludes with an explicit set of contributions to the field and a call for Huntsville and similar auto-dependent communities to incorporate these findings into transportation planning, demand forecasting, and preparedness for future workforce mobility transitions.

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