The World's Chokepoints, Indexed
Monthly ship transits through six of the world's critical maritime chokepoints, each indexed to its own 2019 average so straits of very different scale share one axis. The 2020s read as a sequence of stress tests: Panama's drought throttle came and went, Suez and Bab el-Mandeb halved in the Red Sea crisis and stayed depressed, Malacca ground steadily higher with Asian trade, and in 2026 Hormuz fell off the chart. What was designed as background infrastructure has become a live geopolitical scoreboard.
What does it show?
The 2020s stress-tested every major chokepoint: Suez and Bab el-Mandeb halved in the Red Sea crisis and stayed down, Panama sagged in the drought and recovered — and in 2026 Hormuz collapsed to a fraction of its former traffic.
Methodology
Monthly average daily transits through six major maritime chokepoints from IMF PortWatch AIS-derived data, each indexed to its own 2019 monthly average. Indexing puts chokepoints of very different absolute scale — Malacca handles several times Panama's traffic — on one comparable axis. Months with fewer than 20 reported days are dropped.