The history behind inland shipping is quite interesting. When the first container barges started to appear in the 70s, the minimum distance to make it viable ag

The history behind inland shipping is quite interesting. When the first container barges started to appear in the 70s, the minimum distance to make it viable against trucking was predicted to be 200km+. Nowadays, distances are short as 50km are barged, or even shorter sometimes when doing in-port transshipment within bigger ports like Rotterdam or Antwerp. (Keep in mind that the Rotterdam port area is about 45km long, stretching from Maasvlakte to the city centre) Classically the Rhine region has seen a lot of container transport, but over time other canals and rivers have seen container terminals pop up. In addition, smaller sea ports have essentially become inland ports with the rise of main ports like Rotterdam and Antwerp. The bigger ships (20 000+ containers) are received there, and then distributed onto smaller feeders or barges that will then hop to the various smaller ports in the region. If you look at a map of inland terminals in the Netherlands, you can get to virtually anywhere within a range of 50km over water. In Belgium they are trying to alleviate the heavy truck traffic in the Antwerp region by offloading this traffic onto trains and barges. Even in places where only narrow or shallow canals are available, smaller barges will take 12 to 24 trucks of the road at a time. It's incredible how much potential there still is to take trucks off the road and use water transportation instead. It's much better in terms of CO2 emitted, and it's also a lot cheaper. It's just harder to plan, since there is inflexibility in destinations, you need last-mile trucking, and the total transport will usually be a lot slower. All in all difficult, but solvable problems. Most of these are information problems and that's what my employer is trying to solve in software :)