Water Transportation: Types, Advantages and Disadvantages

Water transportation is known for transporting people, goods, and mail by barges, boats, ships, or sailboats across seas, oceans, lakes, canals, rivers, or other types of water. It is an important means of transportation.

What are water transportation vehicles?

Water transportation is the cheapest way to transport large and perishable goods over long distances. This type of transportation is mainly used to transport people and perishable and easily perishable goods (commonly known as cargo).

Boats are suitable for long-distance travel, commuting, cruising, racing, and off-road riding. Below are many examples of water vehicles. Top examples of Water Transportation Vehicles are: 

• Motor Boats
• Cargo Ships
• Speedboats
• Sailboats
• Yachts
• Ferry
• Canoe
• Sailboats
• Warships
• Cruise Ships
• JetSki
• Windsurf
• Riverboats
• Submarines
• Tugboats

History of Water Transportation

Water transportation can occur along inland rivers and canals or across oceans. This distinction is relevant because the two types have different backgrounds and are of different importance. Rivers have been used for transport for many years if they are naturally navigable, but private canals have only been built on a large scale in the last 200 years (although Egypt and China both have canals dating back more than 2,000 years).

Britain was once a pioneer in inland water transport, but they are now rarely used due to factors such as narrow and short canals.

Only in the middle of the last century did maritime transport depend almost entirely on sailing ships, so the journey was slow and arduous. Ships were simple and could only be divided into two categories: warships and merchant ships.

Since then, a lot has changed. Coal-fired ships were introduced, then oil-fired ships and ships became more specialized in their functions. In addition to commercial (passenger) ships, merchant ships include:

• Container ships (bulk crude oil tankers).
• Small merchant ships.
• Coastal ships and.
• Cargo ships such as tankers.

In particular, the volume of oil tankers has also increased; now, tankers have a deadweight of up to 500,000 tons.

Different Types of water transport

If you think of water transport, the first thing that comes to mind is big or small boats. However, there are many more types of water transport, and since the oceans are so large, there is no limit to what you can discover or how far you can travel by boat.

Water transport was invented to carry people, mail, and cargo across oceans, seas, lakes, canals, and rivers by boat, sailboat, ship, or barge.

Shipping is a very important mode of transport because of its role in commerce, retail, society, and travel (especially long-distance travel). If you think about the thousands of products that fit into a container, they would be impossible to transport from Africa to the United States by plane. Since planes and ships are the only water transport, we can understand why ships are so important.

There are many types of ships, including cruise ships, racing boats, off-road boats, sailboats, riverboats, motorboats, barges, pontoons, catamarans, ferries, yachts, submarines, and tugboats.

It is important to remember that water transport is used in the oceans and inland rivers and canals.

While ships that transport people and goods on the water are extremely important, so is the transportation of people and the use of small boats to cross lakes, rivers, and canals, especially when trading small quantities of goods from one island to another. Water transport is divided into only two categories:

• Inland water transport 
• Ocean water transport

Inland water transport

Inland water transport is a transport system that spans all man-made rivers, lakes, and canals. Many large rivers worldwide are used for transportation by ships and barges.

Major rivers that are important for inland water transport are the Rhine and Dam Rivers in Europe, the Zaire River in Africa, the Nile River in Africa, and the Lower Niger River in Nigeria. Other rivers are the St. Lawrence River in Canada, the Mississippi River in the United States, etc.

Canals are mainly built to connect two navigable oceans. For example, the Suez Canal connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and the Panama Canal connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Ocean water transport

Ocean waterways carry most of the world’s trade, and bulky goods, materials, and passengers are transported from one country to another at the cheapest cost. Different types of ships sail on the high seas.

Examples of ships sailing on the high seas

Passenger ships mainly carry passengers, mail, and high-value cargo. However, they operate on scheduled routes.

Cargo ships: These ships combine cargo and passenger transport and follow scheduled routes like passenger ships. Cargo ships are suitable for transporting perishable goods as most have built-in refrigerators.

Large ships: These are other types of ships used at high altitudes, and they rely on cargo ships that do not have a specific time and place. These ships will set sail only when there is enough cargo to carry. Large ships are designed to carry cargo only.

Tankers and refrigerated ships: These ships are designed to transport oil and perishable goods such as fish, meat, dairy products, and wine only.

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Advantages and disadvantages of water transport

There are benefits and challenges to water transport. Each type of water transport has its importance and disadvantages.

Advantages of water transport

Its low operating costs make it the cheapest mode of long-distance transport.

Large ships are particularly economical, as fuel costs can be spread over many ships. Distance does not significantly increase the total transport cost.

It can transport heavy and bulky goods.

Water transport has a network of natural routes that can be used for free. This allows for flexibility in services, frequency of movement, and lack of congestion (unless the waterway is narrow, as in the Straits of Dover).

Canals provide good access and facilitate the development of industry and trade. Some cities, such as port shops, have grown mainly through their connection to canals.

It causes relatively little environmental pollution, but oil emissions from tankers sometimes seem to be the main problem for this type of transport.

Disadvantages of water transport

This mode of transport is very slow compared to road transport and is therefore unsuitable for perishable goods and urgent cargo.

Delays can occur at locks and docks, and navigation can be interrupted mainly due to bad weather.

They are unsuitable for short trips, as charging is expensive and time-consuming.

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Canals are expensive to build, maintain, and dredge, and their paths are inflexible and winding. Getting an adequate water supply can be difficult, and the limited size of barges may be too small to meet modern needs.

As the number of ships increases, the number of ports capable of receiving ocean-going cargo ships decreases; this results in less flexible methods and services for transporting goods such as oil. For example, supertankers cannot use the Suez Canal, and large ships can no longer access smaller ports, except for the few modern ones.