Chokepoint status

Twenty-eight straits, canals and passages carry most of the world’s seaborne trade. This page reports how much traffic each one is handling today, measured against what it handled before, and how far the global pattern has shifted.

The numbers come from satellite AIS positions for roughly 90,000 vessels, counted into daily transit calls by IMF PortWatch. They run three to nine days behind, which every row states.

Why counting total traffic finds nothing

The obvious index — add up the world’s transits and watch the total fall during a disruption — does not work. We built it and tested it against the Red Sea crisis before publishing anything here.

Through the worst months of that crisis, a breadth measure of how many chokepoints were running below baseline read 25–29%, against a long-run average of 22%. A capacity-weighted total went up.

Both fail for the same reason. Rerouting conserves traffic. Ships did not stop sailing when the Red Sea became dangerous; they sailed around Africa. Bab el-Mandeb lost close to what the Cape of Good Hope gained, and a total that adds the two together sees a quiet month.

So the signal is in the redistribution, not the level.

What the Route Displacement Index measures

The RDI is the distance between today’s distribution of traffic across the 28 chokepoints and the distribution over 2019–2023. It reads directly as a percentage: the share of global chokepoint traffic sitting on a different route than it did before.

It averaged 3.9% through the 2019–2023 baseline period. It has averaged over 7% since December 2023 and has not returned.

The index is derived from PortWatch counts and is published as CSV. It describes redistribution, not cost, delay or risk — a ship that reaches its destination the long way round still arrives.

Two baselines, because either alone misleads

Every route is reported against both its 2019–2023 baseline and its trailing year, and the pair matters more than either figure.

The Suez Canal is the clearest case. Against its trailing year it looks steady. Against 2019–2023 it is down by roughly a third. Both are true: traffic collapsed in early 2024 and has been flat at the lower level ever since. A page showing only the trailing year would report calm; one showing only the pre-disruption baseline would imply something is deteriorating now. The reader needs both.

What this cannot tell you

A transit count is not a delay. It counts ships that moved, not ships waiting at anchor, so congestion is invisible here.

Routes carrying fewer than five vessels a day are marked. A percentage change on a route averaging under one transit a day is arithmetic rather than information, and the Bering Strait going from one ship to two is not news.

The record begins on 1 January 2019. Any statement here about a low or a high means the lowest or highest since 2019, and nothing about earlier periods.

Source and licence

All transit data: IMF PortWatch, derived from satellite AIS.

PortWatch is published under IMF terms, not CC BY 4.0. This is a departure from the rest of this site, where every dataset is offered for reuse without restriction. The figures here — index levels, percentage deviations, baselines — are derived and transformed, and are attributed to the IMF as the source of the underlying data. The raw PortWatch series is not republished.