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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Containerships also use the ocean or canals that were built decades ago. It would be a huge, costly project if the government had to build thousands of miles of canals throughout the country. Like, most cities don’t even have good streets, and you expect them to keep the canals safe and kept-up?
Because the goods being delivered needs to split into smaller, more specific routes as they get closer to the consumer.
Container ships are the cheapest way to get goods across vast distances, but once they reach a particular country, the goods will need to go in different directions to various different people and businesses that will buy them. Because, needless to say, container ships won’t deliver to your door.
So after ships, they go on to trains which take bulk loads of containers to other destinations where they will likely be split up more.
Also trucks, which can take up to a few containers at a time, take goods from ships and trains, and deliver them to more specific locations, such as a warehouse, where vans will then deliver the products to customers doors.
**Tl;dr: the process of delivering a container ship full of goods needs to gradually downsize until it reaches the consumer.**
Canals are way too skinny and the pollution would be insane. Plus you’d need a boat for every container.
Canals are expensive to build and maintain, and are slow.
Things like the Suez and Panama canals make sense only because they are positioned where a relatively short canal can allow huge ships to shortcut thousands of miles off their journey.
For overland distribution they flatly don’t – the cost and low speed make them impractical vs road or rail. The US, and other places, used to have extensive canal networks across areas that had been settled prior to the advent of rail, because without rail they were much more efficient than horse and cart, but as soon as rail lines were put in the canals were mostly made obsolete as a means of commercial transport.
Train tracks have fewer constraints; they can be at any height and fit in a 20′ wide area. A proper container ship canal is wider than an entire rail yard, and the rail yard has all of the necessary equipment to load and unload.
They’re also significantly cheaper and faster.
Cheaper to build railways, cheaper still to build roads. Go check out stuff on the Suez and Panama canals to learn the economic reasons and the sheer scale of the job.
To add to what the other comments said, you have to keep in mind that the alternative to containerships would be planes. You would need a lot more fuel to deliver just a quarter of the cargo to the other side of an ocean if you do so with planes.
Because water doesn’t flow uphill. And if there is any slope of significance, water flows down very quickly.
Unless one is willing to cut through hills and mountains, flatten valleys, cut down forests/jungle and/or build super long tunnels etc, canals cannot be built in many places. This is of course not even counting the expense. Why would anyone spend billions of dollars to save millions of dollars.
Do you imagine that it just takes a few people a few days with shovels to build a canal?
Really big container ships are the cheapest way to transport cargo, assuming you don’t care about being bound to water ways or being really slow
Trucks are expensive but can go anywhere fairly quickly
Trains are moderately expensive, still fairly quick, but can only get you to specific end points
Planes are extremely expensive, very fast, but can only get you to specific end points
Ships are cheap, slowww, and can still only get you to specific end points.
All four fill specific logistics needs. There is plenty of cargo traffic on inland water ways, its just less talked about than the mega cargo ships. [If you look at ship traffic in the US you can see all the markers on the Mississippi and its tributaries](https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-80.1/centery:36.8/zoom:5)
Another consideration is altitude. Canals need locks to raise ships up and down which are expensive and slow. There was once a plan for a super canal in Britain which traced a single contour altitude the complete length of the country, linking many major cities without any locks but as different companies had franchises to build canals on different parts of the country it never happened although many major individual canals that were built follow that golden contour for many miles, they were just never linked up.
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