Water transportation os one of the popular method of transportation widely used by many people across the world. Basically, Water Transport adopts many water carriers or water crafts such as a ship, boat, over the surface of sea, ocean, lake and river. The aspect of buoyancy is the common factor for designing and constructing all these carriers. Among all these carriers, ship transport is known to be used for carrying a large number of people as well as carrying tons of non-perishable goods as cargo. With the advanced technologies, the modern ships are built with several amenities as well they move faster than in the past. Among all the other modes of transportations, sea transport is considered to be the largest carrier of cargo in the world.
Being one of the cheapest and the oldest mode of transports, water transportations operate in the natural track and hence this mode of transport does not need huge investments like the road and rail transportations. Making sea port and the canals in the needy places attract investments. Also, the cost of this mode of transport is very less and this transport can be capable of carrying bulk goods over long distances. Apart from being an indispensable to foreign trade, the sea transportation plays a significant role in making the world closer.
In general, ship transport is more often used for international transport for carrying people as well as cargo. It is primarily done for the purpose of recreation, commerce and few military purposes. Besides these functions, ships are widely used for wars to show the navel supremacy of the fighting nations. This is done in order to minimize the human loss during the wars as these ships carry all types of war equipment to destruct the enemy ships.
More importantly, water transportation is widely used to carry a large number of chemicals, petroleum products, bulk coal, iron etc. Since water forms in a natural way like sea, rivers and lakes, water transportation does not attract any construction cost as well any maintenance cost. Hence this mode of transport is found to be cost-effective for carrying people and goods. Hence, people, have limited budget using this mode of transport in order to save a good amount of money. In addition, water transportation can manage the huge amount of cargo as well as passengers and hence the entire trip cost lesser than the other modes of transport. The larger capacity enables to take even bulk items like big machinery, small aeroplanes, rail coaches etc.
Undoubtedly, there are few disadvantages for people while using the water transportation. First and foremost, the slowness seems to be one of the main drawbacks as it takes longer time for people or goods to reach the destination. Also, this mode of transport is restricted to the areas where the sea rivers or lakes are available. Hence this water transportation can be operated in only a few places unlike the other mode of transports. In addition, one cannot use this transport in all seasons wherein water gets freezes in winter in most of the sea or river belts.
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