Ships barely fit it.
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Because it’s expensive and complicated to cut through a country to build a canal. Barley fitting is all that’s required.
Making it wider would be very expensive, it was originally constructed when ships were generally a lot smaller.
The new locks are a bit bigger and it’s important to remember while ships could be bigger if it was bigger there aren’t a lot of ports in the world that could support ships even bigger than what they already can be.
Also you may or may not be aware but ships barely fit it because ships are built with the canal in mind and to its dimensions. If they made the canal bigger ships would still ‘barely fit it’ as the ships would be bigger.
It’s not small. Ships these days are large. Far larger than the ships of the day.
Also when it was built steam shovels were cutting edge technology and the only infrastructure (like roads) available in the area were ones they made themselves. If we were to make it today we’d make it a lot wider, both because the ships are larger and because it’s a lot easier to do than it was then.
But modifying a canal like Panama is far more complicated and expensive than digging it out in the first place, especially with modern environmental impact concerns. They can’t exactly shut it down for a couple years while they expand it, after all. So the cost/benefit ratio of expanding it just isn’t there.
The canal was actually recently widened, in 2017.
As for why it was so small, at the time it opened in 1914, it could easily handle the largest ships of the time.
The Panama canal was built well over 100 years ago, and the engineering and effort required was unbelievably rigorous and taxing at the time. At the time of its construction, ships were far smaller and narrower than they are today. It just didn’t make any sense to expand far more time, effort, and other resources to build a wider canal at the time. In the same way, many old airports had to be greatly expanded when jets came on the scene, and even today, some airports need to build longer and longer runways to accommodate modern planes.
Panama canal was opened in 1914. First container ships appeared in 1956 with capacity around 500-800 TEU (1TEU = 1 container).
Modern container ships are build with capacity of up to 25000 TEU.
Max capacity for a Panama canal was 4500 TEU. Ships with this capacity have appeared in 1985. Which is about 70 years after the canal was done.
Now they completed expansion trials for up to 15000 TEU. They originally expected this expansion to only be capable of 12500TEU.
TLDR: Ships have gotten much bigger since the canal was constructed.
They don’t “barely fit” they fit it perfectly. Ships are built *to* fit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax
Makes it easier to string up nano-filament line and take out galactic terrorists.
(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZejD5DnfWmY&feature=youtu.be&t=23m30s)
It was built during a time when ships were smaller. However it is impossible to overstate just how big of feat of willpower and engineering the canals were. By the end of the project it cost over $11 billion US dollars in today’s money and the workers had move 240 million cubic yard of earth. So to expand the human made canals by even a small amount would’ve taken even more time and money. So they built them to the average size of most ships of the day in order for the canal to be open as soon as possible. Eventually ships grew as big as they could to fit into the canal to maximize cargo per trip which translates to more money per trip.
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