It’s not the travel time, it’s the increase in efficiency, smoothness and reliability. But travel time was also speeded up, in particular because of the directness, allowing goods to go almost from door to door, instead of from town to town.
In Britain, when canals were first built, before roads or railways there were only the rough rural roads. Often impassable to wagons or coaches because of mud in winter, they were frequently reduced to being used only by packhorses.
But where a packhorse could only carry a couple of hundred pounds, and a wagon maybe a ton, a horse towing a canal boat could easily pull thirty tons or more. Slowly, but steadily.
I’m talking here of Britain, and in particular England, because it’s in England that mass canal-building took off.
There had been efficient navigations in the past (the most spectacular being the Canal du Midi in France in the 1680s, and China’s Grand Canal.) And they were larger in scale and far more efficient in carrying capacity than Britain’s modest canals.
But the explosion of Britain’s canal building, starting about 1760, happened precisely because they were small in scale, easier to drive through the countryside, and not dependent on the water large rivers of the big continents.
Indeed, the small scale meant they could be local - to the extent of running through towns and even in many cases right into factories.
They could thus act as ‘conveyor belts’ between factories. It’s this convenience that meant a small boat could deliver cargo (raw materials or coal or components from one factory to another, hugely speeding up delivery.
An example is in Birmingham, England, which went from sleepy farming town to one of the world’s great manufacturing cities in a couple of generations because of the 160 miles of small-scale canal navigations.
That was the significance of travelling time. Not the speed of travel, but the ability to ship around the country without having to tranship on the outskirts of a town.
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