ABSTRACT
A critical element of any economy is its transportation infrastructure. The rivers, locks, dams, ports, and the like that make up the inland waterway system are of particular important to the U.S. transportation infrastructure. For many commodities and locations, transportation by barge via the inland waterway system is a cheaper, and more economically sound form of transporting goods than either rail or truck. This is especially true of low-value bulk commodities. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the system in the United States. The overview consists of a description of the major waterways in terms of size, traffi c, and trends. We then provide a snapshot of the suppliers of barge transportation in terms of the structure of industry and performance measures. In the fi nal section of the chapter, we describe methods that are used to evaluate improvements in the navigation infrastructure. This description is accompanied by recent criticisms of the modeling and recent research designed to address these criticisms.
