If containerships are the cheapest way to transport cargo, why aren’t we using canals instead of railways and highways to transport goods over land?
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Suppose you want to ship some cargo from LA to Denver. You could either dig a canal through multiple mountain ranges, or send it by train/truck/plane which are more suited for dealing with elevation changes. Even discounting the fact that digging through mountain ranges is super expensive (since we have to do that for trains and trucks anyways), water is really heavy and expensive to move up to higher elevations.
So what about coastal areas, you might ask? For example, LA to Seattle, why don’t we use containerships for that shipping? The answer is the Jones Act, which requires all domestic shipping to use American-built and American-crewed ships. This makes domestic shipping too expensive compared to trains/trucks/planes even between two close-by coastal US cities. Domestic shipping enjoys a relative lack of competition and thus has very low motivation to reduce costs
This is one of the reasons that cost of living is so high in Hawaii. Your options are either to send a ship straight from China (at which point you wouldn’t be allowed to continue onward to a bigger US port) which isn’t often viable due to the small population, send stuff by US-crewed Jones Act compliant ships, or send stuff by plane.
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