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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Because it wouldn’t *remain* the cheapest way if we had to dig canals literally everywhere.
Digging the Panama Canal was an engineering project about the size of the Moon landings, and that was only around 40 miles. If we wanted to transport goods across a continent we’d need to dig thousands and thousands of miles.
It would cost a lot more than just using trains and trucks.
Gravity.
Water flows downhill. Where it does that naturally, we use that for navigation, and most of the places that it’s flat enough to make use of without pumping, we already have canals.
Trains can go uphill, and rather than pump water up, and then move the goods up against the flow, we just use lower rolling friction to make bulk transport efficient on rails.
Then we need last mile transport to individual volumes. Just like you don’t need the 500 loaves of bread your grocery store sells daily, most things aren’t needed in the “entire train full” sort of volume. So we use trucks.
Mmmm, a canal tunnel through the Rocky Mountains…
From sea level Vancouver to 1000Ft high Calgary.
Countries that are ‘flat’ (The Netherlands, north part of Belgium/Germany etc) have waterways, as soon as you have a hill a train might be more convenient.
Shipping by container ship is cheap because those ships are [enormous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ships#/media/File:EVER_ACE_(51426160884).jpg). Some can carry over 10,000 containers at a time. So if it costs $2 million per trip, that’s still only $200 per container.
A canal wide enough & deep enough for a ship like this would be prohibitively expensive. And if you have to unload a big container ship and load it into a smaller canal ship, you don’t get this economy of scale.
Because building canals and maintaining them is expensive. When you dig up load of dirt, it needs to go somewhere, and that costs money. Constant maintenance costs money. Also big ships need really big canals. As ships get smaller to fit in to small canals you lose efficiency quick. Ships efficiency comes from the open sea and being able to accelerate slowly.
But we do use ships primarily, but from the shipyard things tend to go to trucks. This is because (cargo) rails kinda have lost the game because places used to be conviniently connected them, now they no longer are and if they are they are connected to wrong parts since towns and cities grew but rails stood where they are.
However basic cargo might not move by rail, but bulk cargo does.
Because a canal across the united states, or anywhere else, would take an asinine amount of money, an asinine amount of time, and an asinine amount of engineering.
Container Ships are the cheapest way to transport cargo because the ocean is already there.
The cost to acquire land and dig such canals would negate any cost savings. Also cargo ships are most cost effective when moving HUGE amount of cargo at a time, which makes sense when going from a manufacturing hub in China to the US, but less sense when it needs to get to 100 metro areas from that main port.
Costs beyond the ships themselves.
1. The oceans and large rivers were already there. They didn’t cost money to build.
2. Canals are expensive to maintain. There has to be a specific cost-benefit ratio to make them worth it.
3. Rivers can’t transport up and over mountains. Roads can cut through.
4. We would need *far* too many canals to match the road infrastructure that ships good around the continental USA for example. Let alone entire continents. Roads are just cheaper and easier and more adaptable.
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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