Torres Strait
Close to baseline, on one of the board's smallest counts.
Normal −7% 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 | 8 | −12% |
| September 2026 | 8 | −6% |
| August 2026 | 8 | −13% |
| July 2026 | 8 | −7% |
| June 2026 | 10 | +9% |
| May 2026 | 10 | +7% |
The 18 months before that
| Month | Transits/day | vs baseline |
|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | 9 | +3% |
| March 2026 | 8 | −7% |
| February 2026 | 10 | +7% |
| January 2026 | 8 | −6% |
| December 2025 | 9 | +1% |
| November 2025 | 10 | +7% |
| October 2025 | 10 | +10% |
| September 2025 | 9 | +1% |
| August 2025 | 9 | −2% |
| July 2025 | 9 | +4% |
| June 2025 | 10 | +7% |
| May 2025 | 10 | +6% |
| April 2025 | 10 | +13% |
| March 2025 | 10 | +17% |
| February 2025 | 10 | +6% |
| January 2025 | 9 | +2% |
| December 2024 | 10 | +10% |
| November 2024 | 10 | +13% |
Record high 13.4/day (February 2020), record low 7.6/day (September 2026), 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.
Narrow, shallow, and lightly used
Torres Strait separates the northern tip of Australia from Papua New Guinea. It is one of the least-trafficked routes on this board — around eight transits a day — and it is running a few percent below its 2019–2023 baseline and below last year.
Its record spans roughly eight to eleven a day across seven years, which is the narrowest range of any route here.
Why the reading barely moves
A route with a natural ceiling on its traffic does not have much room to vary. Where Suez can lose a third of its transits and still carry forty a day, this route’s entire range is three vessels wide. Percentage changes here reflect that arithmetic more than they reflect events.
What the board does with routes like this
It still counts them. The Route Displacement Index measures shares of total traffic, so a route this size contributes proportionately little to the index — which is the correct treatment, and the reason a two-ship swing here cannot move a global figure.