The chart above shows the length of waterways in US regions. The South has more waterways than the other three regions combined and almost as many as the other three regions doubled.
Findings
- The difference between the region with the most waterways, the South, and the region with the least, the Northeast, is 13,610 miles (21,903 km).
- The South has 7.91 times the waterways that the Northeast does.
- Only the South has more than 5,000 miles (8,047 km) of waterways.
Caveats
- Waterway data is from 2013.
- All figures are rounded to the nearest whole.
- Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming did not have any data.
- The Southern US consists of Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia.
- The Midwestern US consists of Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
- The Western US consists of California, Washington, Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Hawaii, Idaho, Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming.
- The Northeastern US consists of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Details
Louisiana has more waterways than the entire region of the Northeast as well as the entire region of the West. The South has almost two-thirds of the nation's waterways.
The United States as a whole has 24,110 miles (38,801 km) of waterways.
Sources
United States Department of Transportation. 2015. "State Transportation by the Numbers." Accessed March 21, 2018. https://www.bts.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/legacy/_entire.pdf.