Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In 2009, the US Department of Transportation launched a series of urban freight
case studies, including Washington, New York City, Orlando and Los Angeles. The
Los Angeles study provides some data and information on the most urban part of
the region, with a focus on the downtown area. Caltrans, the State DOT, sponsored
a multi government study called Healthy Communities and Healthy Economies,
A Toolkit for Goods Movement (Caltrans 2009), that can also be used by other
governments such as Riverside County. In 2010, SCAG commissioned Cambridge
Systematics to carry out a comprehensive study on warehousing in the region
(Comprehensive Regional Goods Movement Plan and Implementation Strategy,
Industrial Space in Southern California: Future Supply and Demand for Ware-
housing and Intermodal Facilities) (Cambridge Systematics 2010). It provides
much valuable information. In April 2012, SCAG published a draft of its Regional
Transportation Plan 2012-2035 with a Goods Movement Appendix that provides a
large amount of information about the region's goods movement system (SCAG
2011
).
By compiling these diverse studies, we can state the following about freight
flows in the Los Angeles area.
As mentioned in SCAG (2012), 1.15 billion tons of cargo valued at almost
$2 trillion passed through the region in 2010. The data are taken from the Freight
Analysis Framework.
4
Los Angeles' two main seaports, the Port of Los Angeles
and the Port of Long Beach, accounted for 120 million tons of cargo imports and
exports. These were valued at $336 billion. It is interesting to compare this with
the amount of goods passing through Mexican border crossings, whose value
amounted to $10.4 billion in the same year. The two ports handled 14.1 million
TEUs (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units) in 2010 (13.7 in 2011). The region's
highways with the highest concentration of truck trips are the I710, I605, SR60 and
SR91 (see Map
1
). Some of these highways have sections that carry over 25,000
trucks a day. If we turn to warehousing and distribution centers, in 2008, these
represented about 837 million square feet of warehousing space with an estimated
15 % used for port-related activities. As we shall see in
Sect. 3
, demand for
warehousing is actually very high. The SCAG report (SCAG
2011
) foresees a
shortfall of 228 million square feet by 2035.
The Los Angeles region has a very dynamic economy. SCAG (2012) makes a
distinction between two main types of activities: ''services'' on the one hand,
representing 65 % of the economy, and ''goods movement dependent industries—
retail, wholesale, manufacturing, …'' on the other, representing 35 %. In 2009,
Los Angeles County was the top manufacturing county in the US in terms of
manufacturing shipment volume. Within SCAG, manufacturing is dominated by
computers and electronics. One-third of manufacturing is for local uses, one-third
is exported nationally, and one-third is exported abroad. Manufacturing in SCAG
requires $17 billion of spending on transport, while retail requires $11 billion
4
FAF is a compilation of freight databases made by the US DOT.
http://www.ops.fhwa.dot.gov/
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