Dover Strait
One of the busiest stretches of water in the world, and one of the steadiest.
Normal +2% against its 2019–2023 baseline
Reading for — 6 days ago. Figures are a 30-day mean, so one quiet day does not move them.
Two years of daily transits
Month by month
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| October 2026 | 164 | +0% |
| September 2026 | 168 | +2% |
| August 2026 | 155 | −6% |
| July 2026 | 158 | −4% |
| June 2026 | 160 | −2% |
| May 2026 | 170 | +4% |
The 18 months before that
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | 171 | +4% |
| March 2026 | 182 | +11% |
| February 2026 | 172 | +5% |
| January 2026 | 162 | −2% |
| December 2025 | 173 | +5% |
| November 2025 | 179 | +9% |
| October 2025 | 170 | +4% |
| September 2025 | 174 | +6% |
| August 2025 | 171 | +4% |
| July 2025 | 170 | +4% |
| June 2025 | 177 | +8% |
| May 2025 | 178 | +8% |
| April 2025 | 178 | +9% |
| March 2025 | 179 | +9% |
| February 2025 | 185 | +12% |
| January 2025 | 163 | −1% |
| December 2024 | 169 | +3% |
| November 2024 | 177 | +8% |
Record high 188.7/day (February 2023), record low 144.2/day (July 2020), on the 30-day mean since January 2019.
Source
Daily transit counts derived from satellite AIS positions by IMF PortWatch, covering 2841 days from 1 January 2019.
Source: IMF PortWatch, https://portwatch.imf.org. PortWatch is published under IMF terms rather than CC BY 4.0, unlike the rest of the data on this site: the figures here are derived and transformed, and the underlying series is not republished.
Steady, and that is the point
The Dover Strait is the narrowest part of the English Channel and one of the highest-volume routes in this set. It runs within a few percent of its 2019–2023 baseline and slightly below where it was a year ago.
Across seven years the record spans roughly 144 to 188 transits a day. That is a narrow band for a route this busy, and it makes Dover a useful control: when a disruption is global rather than regional, it should show up here too. Through the Red Sea diversion of 2024 it did not.
The one dip worth knowing
The record low is July 2020. The record high is February 2023. Neither is far from the average, which is the whole character of this route — it absorbs variation rather than transmitting it.
Why steady routes belong on this board
Most of the value in a disruption index comes from routes that are not disrupted. Without them there is no way to tell a global shock from a local one, and the Route Displacement Index needs a stable majority to measure displacement against.