Cape of Good Hope

The destination of a diversion

Most routes on this board are down. This one roughly doubled, and the month it happened is unambiguous: January 2024, when the daily average went from 51 to 72 and kept climbing.

That is the same month Bab el-Mandeb and the Suez Canal fell. Vessels avoiding the Red Sea corridor took the long way round Africa, and the gain here is a similar size to the loss there.

Why this matters more than either number alone

Because the traffic was conserved, a world total of chokepoint transits barely moved through the largest shipping disruption in a decade. Add the routes together and nothing happened. That is the reason the Route Displacement Index measures how traffic is distributed rather than how much of it there is.

This route is the clearest single piece of evidence for that design.

Still elevated, and no longer moving

Against its own baseline the Cape carries far more than it used to. Against last year it is flat. The diversion is not growing; it has become the arrangement.