Fatemeh Ranaiefar, Senior Associate, Fehr & Peers

Title

Data analytics for Warehousing Transportation Analysis

Time

1:40pm - 3:00pm

Location

1605 Tilia, Room 1103, West Village

Abstract

“Demand for warehouse space is hitting record highs, and that doesn’t appear to be abating anytime soon. Demand is up 22% year-over-year in 2021. Logistics and parcel delivery is driving this growth. The 1,800 individual future tenants that participated in a study need over 600 million square feet of space” [9th annual Industrial Tenant Demand Study, published by JLL Industrial]. While all these facilities are called “industrial warehouses”, they can be very different in terms of their hours of operation, volume/type/length of truck trips generated, level of employment and impacts on the local transportation network. In recent years vacant lands and closed department store buildings in urbanized areas have been transformed into sorting facilities, last mile delivery, or fulfillment centers. These are dynamic facilities, such that their traffic patterns can change drastically as they respond to demand and requirements of the supply chain.

I will discuss how we used Big Data to review the traffic patterns of a sample of these warehouses across United States from rural areas to dense urban cores, both pre and post Covid 19 Pandemic and discuss the following questions:

• What is the transportation typography of warehouses (trip generation, trip length distribution, peak and off-peak operation)?
• How Big Data can support transportation planning for cities hosting major warehousing operation? What are the gaps in the data?
• How warehousing uses can be accounted in transportation demand and forecasting?
• What does growth and changes in warehousing operation mean for roadway design and maintenance, multimodal planning and safety, and access for trucks

Biographical Sketch

Ms. Fatemeh Ranaiefar joined Fehr & Peers after her PhD. graduation from University of California, Irvine in 2013. She specialized in freight transportation modeling, developing performance measures, and developing decision support tools for prioritizing projects to address freight issues. Even though “models” are great tools but observed freight data is a gem can tell the real story so much better! In recent years Fatemeh focused on using commercial fleet GPS probe data and other available public or crowd source freight data to describe the needs and impacts of freight transportation systems. Preparing meaningful statistics, understanding the limitations of the data, who is over/underrepresented in the samples or surveys and how trends are changing over time are important details that helps developing more practical and successful solutions.

She has provided several training workshops for public agencies’ empowering staff to understand the freight data analytics, develop and evaluate freight forecasting scenario alternatives and assess projects and strategies under these scenarios based on comprehensive freight performance measures. Her recent major projects are California Freight Mobility Plan (CFMP 2020), California Statewide Freight Forecasting Model (CSFFM) development, SCAG Heavy Duty Truck Model Update, Utah Statewide Freight Model update, Virginia State Truck Parking Study, SANDAG Gateway study, impacts and opportunities of freight for SCAG communities and NCHRP 20-102(22) State and Local Impacts of Automated Freight Transportation Systems.

She is passionate about research community and developing next generation of transportation enthusiasts. She serves on TRB Urban Freight and Freight Transportation Planning and Logistics committees. She teaches transportation modeling to Master students at USC and guide students on their dissertation.