An Employee Commute Analysis

This is a fairly simple network analysis that attempts to determine how a large number of employees will be affected when the company relocates the corporate headquarters from one part of town to another. Specifically, we want to find out how much the average employee's daily commuting time will change after the office moves. But before we begin, let's make a wish that the drive won't be significantly longer, especially considering that many of the employees will be moving from a cushy office to "cube city", and we sure don't want any disgruntled employees running around.

The company wrestling with this decision is Vulcan Materials Company, a Fortune 500 company, and the nation's largest producer of crushed stone aggregate (rocks) and a leading producer of industrial chemicals. The company has always been based in Birmingham, Alabama, and has already relocated the corporate office to other parts of town twice, once in 1958 and again in 1975. Now it is 1998 and time to move again. The map in Figure 1 shows the location of the current office called "Metroplex" and the location of the proposed office at a new development site called "Liberty Park".

As you can see from this map, there is a high concentration of employees around the Metroplex office (the red star), while the area east of Liberty Park (the blue star) remains mostly undeveloped. The two offices are roughly 11 minutes apart in drive time, and 6 miles apart in drive distance. This suggests to us that the average employee's commute could turn out to be a little bit longer to the new office building at Liberty Park�

So now that we have the two office points, a geocoded set of employee residences, and a good road network shape, we're ready to test our theory. First we run a network analysis from the Metroplex office to each employee's home, and categorize them in 5-minute drivetime increments (for ease of classification later). Next, we run the same network analysis, but this time from the proposed Liberty Park site to each employee's house, using the same classifications. Finally, we simply compare each employee's Metroplex drivetime vs his/her Liberty Park drivetime and see what the difference is. If it's negative, then the employee will have a shorter drive to work; if it's positive, the employee will have a longer drive to the new office.