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Nice article, but ...

>Apparently, most shipping routes tend to hug the coast and make cargo or maintenance stops anyway, and so this won’t really be a big change from current practice.

This is not true.



For the amount of ships this may be true, but not for the amount of TEU shipped.


I'm not sure how true the bunker fuel thing is these days either. Many countries have been working to address this.


Do you have more information? Like what fraction of total TEU-miles are on short routes?


You can get a sense by looking at the interactive map here: https://www.vox.com/2016/4/25/11503152/shipping-routes-map


That map actually makes me think the statement is true. Even if there are a bunch of ships crossing the Atlantic and the Pacific, the really thick streams of ships mostly stick close to land. The only heavily-trafficked routes that stray far from land are the Singapore - South Africa route and to a lesser extent the South Africa - Brazil routes.

The Great Circle between Los Angeles and Beijing cuts through Dutch Harbor and the Aleutians. http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=PEK-LAX

There are certainly remaining routes that might not be well-served by the "electric short hop" strategy, but I think most of the world's shipping routes could be amenable to Fleetzero's electrification plan.

And a bigger version of that same map:

https://www.shipmap.org/


It's hard to get a sense of what the majority is from that, but it seems like there's a lot of ships that are hugging the shorelines and a lot that aren't.



It's not clear to me. If you're able to estimate the fraction of cargo shipped on short-haul coastal routes from that picture, can you share what number you arrived at and how?


>Red means the route is busier

https://www.statista.com/statistics/253988/estimated-contain...

Transatlantic + transpacific routes account for ~60% of cargo shipped.


To me it looks like ships go either in straight shortest lines, some great circle or some known current. There appears to be lot of coast hugging, but there is actually very little stopping there.


Great resource, thanks for sharing!




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