This study presents a comprehensive analysis of public sentiment toward traffic management policies in Knoxville, Tennessee, utilizing social media data from Twitter and Reddit platforms. We collected and analyzed 7906 posts spanning January 2022 to December 2023, employing Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) for sentiment analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling. Our findings reveal predominantly negative sentiment, with significant variations across platforms and topics. Twitter exhibited more negative sentiment compared to Reddit. Topic modeling identified six distinct themes, with construction-related topics showing the most negative sentiment while general traffic discussions were more positive. Spatiotemporal analysis revealed geographic and temporal patterns in sentiment expression. The research demonstrates social media's potential as a real-time public sentiment monitoring tool for transportation planning and policy evaluation.

Traffic evacuation plays a critical role in saving lives in devastating disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, etc. An ability to evaluate evacuation plans in advance for these rare events, including identifying traffic flow bottlenecks, improving traffic management policies, and understanding the robustness of the traffic management policy are critical for emergency management. Given the rareness of such events and the corresponding lack of real data, traffic simulation provides a flexible and versatile approach for such scenarios, and furthermore allows dynamic interaction with the simulated evacuation. In this paper, we build a traffic simulation pipeline to explore the above problems, covering many aspects of evacuation, including map creation, demand generation, vehicle behavior, bottleneck identification, traffic management policy improvement, and results analysis. We apply the pipeline to two case studies in California. The first is Paradise, which was destroyed by a large wildfire in 2018 and experienced catastrophic traffic jams during the evacuation. The second is Mill Valley, which has high risk of wildfire and potential traffic issues since the city is situated in a narrow valley.