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by dmurray
718 days ago
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Inland water-based transport has fallen out of favour these days, not because there's anything wrong with it but because road and rail have got so much better in the last 150 years. If canal technology had improved at the same rate and we had a magical economic way of building canals over huge mountains, like the one described in the article, of course we'd contemplate building more of them. Connect Denver to San Francisco, connect the Amazon to the Pacific via La Paz, connect Buenos Aires to Santiago, connect the Brahmaputra to the Pearl River over the Himalayas, connect Nagoya to the Sea of Japan via Kyoto. |
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New Orleans connects directly to Minneapolis, Chicago, much of the Ohio River Valley, I think to or near Omaha, up the Red River along the Texas-Oklahoma state line, and via the St. Lawrence Seaway to Toronto, Montreal, and ultimately the North Atlantic.
Central Europe has river transit from the North Sea (Hamburg, Amsterdam) to the Black and Baltic. Russia similarly has water routes from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Much of the problem with routes such as SF <-> Denver is lack of water. The Great Basin is dry. The watershed for Los Angeles extends east 1,500 miles, to Denver, via the Colorado River, which is bled dry before it reaches the sea.
Further north, the Columbia-Missouri rivers nearly meet, and the dream of Louis & Clark could possibly come to be. Rail just happens to be far more practical.