Shipping chokepoints & freight corridors
Where a local problem stops being local news and starts being a freight-market event. Each corridor has sourced transit volumes, the standing mechanisms that transmit a disruption, and the stories we are tracking on it.
Global chokepoints
Straits and canals with no realistic detour at volume — the ones where a closure reprices a trade lane rather than delaying it.
The only sea route out of the Persian Gulf, and the single most concentrated point of failure in world energy trade.
The Asia–Europe short cut.
The southern gate to the Red Sea, between Yemen and Djibouti.
The Indian Ocean–Pacific corridor and the busiest oil chokepoint on earth by volume.
The Asia–US East Coast short cut, and the one major chokepoint whose capacity is set by rainfall.
The Black Sea's only outlet, running through the middle of Istanbul.
The main north–south lane between the Northeast Asian manufacturing belt and everywhere south of it.
Not a chokepoint but the relief valve: the standing alternative to Suez, and the route that absorbs Asia–Europe traffic whenever the Red Sea is judged unsafe.
Domestic corridors
Port complexes, rail interchanges, inland waterways and land borders where domestic freight concentrates.
The San Pedro Bay complex is the largest container gateway in the United States and the primary landing point for transpacific imports.
The largest rail interchange in North America and the point where eastern and western Class I railroads hand freight to each other.
The barge highway carrying US grain from the Midwest to Gulf export elevators, plus a large volume of fertiliser, coal and petrochemicals moving the other way.
Laredo, Otay Mesa, El Paso, Detroit–Windsor and Buffalo–Fort Erie carry the overwhelming majority of North American surface trade.
Houston, Corpus Christi, New Orleans and the surrounding refining and LNG complex — the export side of the US energy trade and the origin of a large share of global petrochemical and resin movements.
Following the news rather than the geography? The Freight Movement desk lists every story as it lands, tagged to the corridor it touches.
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