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Part of this is also the different geography: Europe has more useful rivers and seas, so very bulk cargo can go by barge or ship.
by Symbiote 3y ago
Part of this is also the different geography: Europe has more useful rivers and seas, so very bulk cargo can go by barge or ship.
- mgsouth 3y agoThe Mississipi, Ohio, and Columbia Rivers enter the room, sit down at a table where the Great Lakes are already drinking.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoThat's nice. The western two-thirds of the country gets the Columbia. That, um, might be a bit inadequate for their freight needs... I mean, sure, you can get to Kansas City and Omaha via the Missouri. You can't get to Denver, though, or Phoenix, or Salt Lake, or...
- rufus_foreman 3y ago"the United States is the world's largest consumer market for a reason: its rivers. Transporting goods by water is 12 times cheaper than by land (which is why civilizations have always flourished around rivers). And the United States, Zeihan calculates, has more navigable waterways — 17,600 miles' worth — than the rest of the world. By comparison, he notes, China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles. And all of the Arab world has 120 miles." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-americas-prospects-are-promising-indeed/2014/11/20/eb91209a-70f3-11e4-ad12-3734c461eab6_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-ameri...
- anamax 3y agoTo be fair, Germany is fairly small (by US/China) standards. The continental US (no Alaska or Hawaii) is > 22.5 times as big as Germany but has only 8.8 times as many miles of "navigable waterways." (However, it's not clear if the US numbers include the Great Lakes or the oceans; LA to Seattle and Miami to NYC goes by ocean, not some river.) But, that doesn't leave much for the rest of Europe.