There are a lot of lakes, but constructing a new canal that's big enough for these sorts of ships is an expensive endeavour, that can only be done in few select places in the first place.
I 100% agree with this article, but I suspect it will not be well received here. HN is so focused on innovation at all costs that anything that goes against that will be rejected.
I think that one of the issues with doing as the author suggests and thinking of technology as a transformation is that it can be hard to come up with the downsides of your new tech. Engineers will constantly be encouraged by management and customers to deliver a solution, and often saying 'this is my solution, but it comes with caveats' will be frowned upon. Additionally, it's clear in retrospect that the expansion of the city the grand canal allowed would lead to depletion of the ground water which would lead to sinking of the city and the canal being inneffective, but was that known at the time? Could engineers working on a canal project have anticipated socioeconomic trends like this? I'm not saying they couldn't have, just that it's difficult.
From a system design perspective, it's kind of nuts that the entire planet has only one single canal connecting two major bodies of water, and it's in a country with a, shall we say, precarious government. Surely such a single point of failure is a massive risk. Granted, geography doesn't leave us many choices, but could we at least build another, parallel canal to it?
Canals are tough because the maintenance of the canal is much harder, and the flow of the canal also makes things tricky.
Dr. Brandi McKuin has done some work here, looks like the best way to do this is to hang the panels suspended on cables over the canals, but that requires a lot of steel and is thus fairly expensive. I don't think we've cracked that nut yet...
This makes me question that shouldn't we have another canal built? Like if so much of the world's economy depends on this route shouldn't we build an extra canal to speed up the transportation and also act as a redundancy
I think the problem was there wasn't a US canal available.
Seriously: this shows to me that people will use any infrastructure that is most convenient/fast for them. If there are highways people will drive. Build public transport and people will use that. Build bike paths and people will bike. If you have canals like Amsterdam, well...
Canals are probably not very fast nor scalable for mass transit, but they may be useful for transporting heavy things.
Somewhat worrying that the people in charge of protecting Boston from flooding would waste their time on such an obviously impractical and pointless idea.
Even if Boston already had canals they would still need to build surrounding flood protection systems just like Venice and Amsterdam. So why build the canals?
Interior canals can actually make flooding more likely as New Orleans learned when breaks along canals were responsible for flooring the city after Katrina. The solution - as a everywhere else - was beefed up perimeter defenses not more canals. Canals just make the problem harder and the risks greater. Why build a system to deliver vast quantities of water to the center of a city?
The real problem with building reliable flood protection is that it is impossible to fully test and may not be tested by nature for a very long time. This requires sustained effort by level headed engineers and planners not politically motivated dreamers.
I assume they’ll widen the parts of the canal that are easy (long stretches with either no or minimal reinforcement of the banks) and leave stuff like the locks themselves alone as I doubt their easy to widen at all.
For one thing, lead times are long and costs are high so there is a huge risk that your capital will be wasted if costs come down before projects are complete.
Secondly not all the bottlenecks can simply have a new entrant. For example, the article cites panama canal constraints as a factor. Launching a competitor to the panama canal requires more than just time and money, it requires political and geographic opportunities.
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