01555175

Component

The Panama Canal expansion project is one of the world’s largest transportation projects in recent years. The impact from this project will be a global one, as it would improve the competitiveness of routes for shipping containers between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Many works have focused on the impact of the canal expansion to the US logistics network, with little focus to Canada. This study attempts to evaluate the impact of the expansion on goods imported from Hong Kong destined for nine major Canadian cities. Specifically, routing options are modeled based on the three parameters: shipping distance, shipping time, and shipping efficiency respectively. The outcomes reveal that the expansion has little to no effect on shipping time; accessing Canada via the western ports followed by rail shipping to destination cities continues to be the preferred route. However, considering shipping efficiency, widening of the canal improves the economies of scale of shipping via the Panama Canal. Depending on the urgency associated with the commodities being shipped, cities such as Montreal and Halifax will see an increase in goods from Asia being shipped through the Panama Canal into the Port of Halifax and Port of Montreal.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AT045 Intermodal Freight Transport.

01550057

15-0446

English

15p

2015

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Container traffic; Economic impacts; Economies of scale; Intermodal transportation; Logistics; Route choice

Panama Canal

Canada

Economics; Freight Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; I10: Economics and Administration; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-0446

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 12:16PM