Long term maybe, but it'll take years for the rest of the logistics network to fully accommodate the new capacity and do things like building more ships or reallocating routes. In the meantime the new ports would probably undercut Panama fees to attract traffic that would otherwise go via the canal.

Not really as the canal is overfull so anyone in shipping has incentive to see if they can make this work for some shipments now.

Yeah we recently had a load pay something like $1.5m to jump up the queue to transit the canal. Not even a "guaranteed transit by X" but just jumping up the line! Which at the time was something like a month and a half long, IIRC.

Being a specialized load (read, unusual cargo, not containerized, on a barge) I doubt transloading to rail and back onto a ship on the other side would have been practical in our case but for other cargoes? It might be an attractive alternative.

Why not go around if the queue is a month and a half long?

I'm not an expert, but my understanding in large freight is that Cost >>> Time. Going around probably costs a lot more in fuel etc would be my guess.

And some freight (LNG) is consumed by waiting or going around (the ship burns it to generate power to cool the LNG)!

It would have to burn that anyways.

Cape Horn is quite hazardous, so it's not a journey to prefer anyways.

Friend went through the canal and had to sit for a few days with a bunch of other ships. That's something operators hate. Because any time spent waiting is lost opportunity.

I'm assuming being able to punt and offload and swap cargo would be a welcome alternative for operators. Maybe you spend a day to offload and load new cargo but that would beat waiting two days for a slot to open up at the panama canal.

Also there is already a railway along the canal, the Panama Canal Railway which connects coast to coast.

That's a much shorter train trip than this Mexico one.

So why isn't this rail line already taking the traffic Mexico hopes for?

The Panama canal rail line does carry cargo, but its capacity is much less than the canal; every dollar that Panama spends improving the rail line is a dollar not spent improving the canal.

Yeah I remember having this realization after I ran the numbers. A canal with a massive ship beats rail easily on throughput. So much for my idea to have ships plug into a maglev railway and fire their containers to the other side.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38992104

I don't think your math works out. Let's assume you want to move 3000 containers along a 3000 mile path. Let's also assume 1: you can stack containers one high onto the railway at the rate one container per minute, 2: the containers will move at 300 miles per hour and 3: the ship moves at 20.

On thenship all 3000 containers arrive at once and the total time to move them is 3000miles / 20 = 150 hours.

On the rail the containers take 50hr to offload. Hence the first container will arrive at the other side in 3000/300 = 10 hours. The _last_ container will arrive at 60 hrs 0 minutes. At one minute per container in the 150hrs it took the ship to arrive you could have delivered 140*60 = 8400 containers to the other side.

Not that the ship is only 15 times slower than the railway.

The governing factors on your railway are the ratios for distance to travel vs the offload time. Or put another way the delay bandwidth product.

>At one minute per container in the 150hrs it took the ship to arrive you could have delivered 140*60 = 8400 containers to the other side.

If you're considering a case of 3000 miles, that's not a canal anymore and can use the full size ships that carry 18,000 containers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_E-class_container_ship?...

I’ve heard operating those cranes is a taxing job. Load and unload costs probably stack up.

It can be almost fully automated. Including 'AI-assist(FM(fake mark))' for compensating wind load/unload from/to ship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_Terminal_Altenwerder

I've seen these in action many times and called it 'techno-ballet'. Rather impressive. I guess meanwhile there are even more advanced ports, but I didn't track that development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Rotterdam#Robotic_cont... comes to mind, though.

I think the throughput is currently quite limited because of low levels of water in the natural lakes close to Panama which are used for both Panama's drinking water and for the locks in the canal, so they're restricting the number of ships per day...