river transport

Society

2022

We explain what river transport is, its advantages, disadvantages and other characteristics. In addition, differences with maritime transport.

Cities like Moscow are crossed by rivers that allow river transport.

What is river transport?

River transport is made up of those modes of transport aquatic transport that occur in lakes, rivers and fluvial channels endowed with the appropriate depth. This type of transport plays a very important role in contemporary economic dynamics, despite the fact that its origins, strictly speaking, date back to the beginning of the humanity.

River transport can take care of the movement of goods and merchandise, or also of passengers. In many cases it serves as a link between two important maritime regions, such as the Panama Canal, which connects the oceans Atlantic and Pacific.

Such is its importance, that in many cases it is invested in the adaptation of some rivers of volume enough to make them passable and commercially viable.

Many of the great rivers of the world, such as the Amazon, the Orinoco, the Danube, the Rhine, the Thames, the Douro or the Río de la Plata are navigable and offer an important opportunity for the developing of river transport in different proportions depending on the case.

See also:

River transport characteristics

River transport can take place in three specific ways:

  • Regular line services. Those transport routes that obey a predefined, fixed and stable pattern and trajectory, under a contract from knowledge shipment issued by the ship to the shipper.
  • Boat services without fixed route. Also known as general service, it is a type of transport that is not guided by established routes or regular itineraries, preferring instead to transport passengers or goods according to a more versatile criterion.
  • Oil tanker services. The presence of oil transport is such in the river sector, that they compose a type in themselves. These are, of course, boats adapted for the transport of substances such as gasoline, paraffin or lubricants, when not Petroleum freshly extracted crude.

Whatever the case, what these modes have in common is that they take place in rivers, lakes or canals, generally with the purpose of connecting regions without access to the sea but with access to internal masses of Water.

River and maritime transport

The fundamental difference between river and maritime transport has to do, obviously, with the body of water that your ships pass through. Maritime transport moves by seas Y oceans, while in the case of fluvial, lakes, rivers and other continental water bodies.

This difference is not minor, since the design and handling of the boats for each type are quite different, since many rivers and lakes lack the depth and breadth that the seas have, thus requiring more specialized work.

Advantages of river transport

River transportation can be cheaper than land or sea options.

River transport has important advantages for the population that benefits from it, since in many cases they have no access to the sea and without river transport they would be forced to manage 100% with the ground transportation, which is an important limitation.

Instead, ships generally allow displacement of greater volumes of material or people than the land, so that its economic importance is in many cases undeniable.

On the other hand, it is a much more economical, practical and short-term type of transport than maritime, with low accident rates and noise or gas pollution, compared to land transport.

Disadvantages of river transport

At the same time, river transport presents important challenges, such as:

  • The deterioration of river channels. Since the rivers in many occasions deserve treatment, widening or preparation to be navigable, and this has a high local ecological cost, despite the fact that the ships then are generally not very polluting.
  • Seasonal use. Many rivers become impassable depending on the season, either because they have floods and overflows, or because they dry up and lose navigability. This greatly limits the usefulness of river transport.
  • Environmental risk from spills. Given the incidence of oil tankers in river transport, the risk spill is constant.

River transport boats

Tankers can carry large volumes of liquid or gas.

River transport imposes the need for very specific vessels, which we can broadly classify into:

  • Freighters. Merchandise ships, which typically carry few passengers and a lot of merchandise, generally made up of packaging, cereals, minerals, liquids, etc.
  • Container ships. With a very high level of specialization, they are able to upload and download their content in a single day, almost always of an industrial nature. They usually connect with the railway transport or with the maritime one.
  • Tanker ships. Tankers and other vessels designed to transport liquids and gases (such as the natural gas liquefied), or fuels and hydrocarbons.
  • Passenger ships. Designed in different ways and with different passenger capacities, they range from motorboats and boats to river cruises.
!-- GDPR -->