Moving stuff efficiently

Morgan Downey:

Today when a consumer on the US east coast buys a Chinese manufactured product it is highly likely it was shipped across the Pacific to Long Beach, California and then trucked using diesel fuel via road or rail across the US.

Bloomberg has an interesting story on the effect the expansion of the Panama Canal could have on US railways. The canal expansion may be among the largest fuel savers for US consumers over the next 15 years.

(The implication is that volume will move away from cross-country rail shipping, which would not be good news for Warren Buffett's latest investment).

Map of the day: Access to markets in Ethiopia

From Roving Bandit, these striking graphs show how close a given point in Ethiopia is to international and domestic demand centers, respectively, in terms of travel time. If you're a farmer, living in a green area means your end markets are very far away, and transport will eat up a big chunk of the end price of whatever you're producing.

Transport times like this give you large import/export parity price wedges like this:

... which obviously leads to a lot of price volatility, which is bad for producers and consumers alike.

(the latter graph is a favorite of mine from the World Development Report 2008 on agriculture and development.)