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Capacity

The canal handles more vessel traffic than had ever been envisioned by its builders. In 1934 it was estimated that the maximum capacity of the canal would be around 80 million tons per year; as noted above, canal traffic in 2015 reached 340.8 million tons of shipping.

To improve capacity, a number of improvements have been made to maximize the use of the locking system:

These improvements enlarged the capacity from 300 million PCUMS (2008) to 340 PCUMS (2012). These improvements were started before the new locks project, and are complementary to it.