The data being ~4 days delayed does kind of make this less useful. It is a nice concept and cool to see the historical data though. Just think the domain and the large "NO" doesn't really fit with the lack of current data.
What do you think of adding prediction market data to the indication? So basically there's this:<p><a href="https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-returns-to-normal-by-april-30/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-returns-to-normal-by-april-30" rel="nofollow">https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-return...</a><p>My approach would be if that jumps up to 90%+ it would change to YES. And if we get into May they have one for then too:<p><a href="https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-returns-to-normal-by-end-of-may" rel="nofollow">https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-return...</a><p>You can actually see in the last 24 hours it jumped up with the ceasefire and Iran saying they would open it and fell back with reports it's been shut down again easlier today.
Totally agree, I put some text and tried to make it clear. My first intention was to find some live ship tracking API and see how many ships cross the strait, but they were all hundreds of dollars a month, and behind enterprise contact forms.
I believe NASA / EU provide daily satellite imagery for free (which is of relatively high quality too). I wonder if there's a way to take that data, and training some kind of image recognition model that figures out "movement" or something to the same end? Would be cool to see
Funnily enough, I did find a few satellite sources at the beginning for the map background and noticed that all the ships seemed to be scrubbed from the image. It's an interesting idea, thanks for the comment!<p>The sources I used were:<p>- ESRI World Imagery[1] — free satellite tiles, high-res, but ships are stripped out from the imagery<p>- NASA GIBS - VIIRS[2] — near real-time daily satellite imagery from NASA, but resolution is ~375m so ships aren't visible anyway<p>- Mapbox Satellite[3] — high-res and looks great, but same deal — ships are scrubbed from the composited imagery<p>1. <a href="https://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Imagery/MapServer" rel="nofollow">https://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_I...</a>
2. <a href="https://earthdata.nasa.gov/engage/open-data-services-software/earthdata-developer-portal/gibs-api" rel="nofollow">https://earthdata.nasa.gov/engage/open-data-services-softwar...</a>
3. <a href="https://www.mapbox.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.mapbox.com</a>
OP, DM me and I'll get you a persistent key for this data. Not from MarineTraffic
Very cool! I love one off intresting sites like this. Thanks for building it and talking a little bit about where the data comes from etc.<p>On the note of Ai agent getting the data for you, could you not just build a chrome extention that intercepts/read the api response and then uploads it to whatever ingest endpoint you have? You could probably just call their api end points they use on the page as well but not sure what protections they have so might be a bit tricky. A custom chrome extention could do it though if they have protections.
Their APIs are protected by cloudflare, I didn't want to circumvent that. Also I dont really want to make a chrome extension or have a browster tab open, if that's what you meant? I've already made a cron style agent framework[1] so that's what I'd probably reach for since they can actually open the browser and inspect the network traffic to grab the json.<p>1. <a href="https://botctl.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://botctl.dev/</a>
I work for a consultancy that does vessel tracking as one of its main products, and yeah it's expensive! afaik they have remote teams with sensors at key points and a bunch of people using AI/software to manage things like GPS spoofing. So it's all pretty guarded proprietary stuff.<p>Great bit of topical datavis here.
Maps can be so misleading. It looks like a dredging operation in Omani waters could alleviate this, if we'd started decades ago.<p>Moving to a topographic view, it becomes clear the neck of land at "two seas view" is narrow, but tall. It would literally be moving a mountain.<p>Panamax and suezmax boats are smaller than ULCC supertankers.<p>Ferdinand De Lesseps time has passed. This would be ruinously expensive. Better to negotiate with rational intent.
Really liked this. Made me laugh even if not intentionally funny.<p>Also, given how markets and news cycles are moved with words not actions these days, I really like this site.<p>There are still so many misaligned interests; this is a much tougher situation that may get some local stability for a period, but will likely return to chaos again.
You might want to rethink scraping marinetraffic before you get a call from their lawyers?<p><a href="https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/p/terms" rel="nofollow">https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/p/terms</a>
Fair enough, I'm actually not scraping it on any automated cycle currently, I just manually copied the JSON from their site to get some ships on the map.<p>There's a few live ship tracking APIs I considered but they are expensive or their free offering just straight up didn't work. I sent a few an email if they would consider sponsoring the project, no replies yet.<p><pre><code> - AISStream.io — https://aisstream.io — Down/not working
- DataDocked — https://datadocked.com — Ran out of credits on a single failed request
- VesselFinder — https://www.vesselfinder.com/realtime-ais-data — Enterprise contact form, asked if they wanted to sponsor in exchange for a link
- MarineTraffic — https://www.marinetraffic.com, their API is like an enterprise contact form, same as above, waiting for response.</code></pre>
<a href="https://warescalation.com/" rel="nofollow">https://warescalation.com/</a> is also a good source of info.
Very cool, thanks for sharing!<p>What's the threshold function? Do you have graduating `No --> Partially --> Mostly --> Open`?<p>Also what's the update cadence?
So if it's under 25% of the prior year's crossing it goes to NO, otherwise it's counted as open.<p>The update cadence kinda sucks because I didn't spring for the $200 a month live ship tracking data, so I'm using <a href="https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a1730" rel="nofollow">https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a...</a> which lags by 4 days which isn't great for a site like this, but was fine for me on a little side project. Open to other data sources or ideas, of if anyone wants to sponsor an API key (I did reach out to a few vendors already if they would give the project api key in exchange for a link to their site).<p>The original idea was to track ships and see how many crossed the strait but as mentioned above I didn't find any free sources so I went with what I did.
This will be inherently inaccurate because data was based on public AIS signal, but ships are turning off their AIS to avoid detection.<p>> In an attempt to evade detection, many ships appear to be deliberately switching off their tracking system - known as AIS (Automatic Identification System).
<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4geg0eeyjeo" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4geg0eeyjeo</a>
Another funny thing about this was this morning I checked if the domain isthestraitofhormuzopenyet.com was available and it was, and by the time I made the site locally, put it on vercel I went to buy the domain to point DNS to it someone had bought it! I renamed it to the current site url / repo which i think might be a little nicer to type, but crazy that we had same idea on apparently the same day. I was also just telling a friend about simultaneous invention aka multiple discover[1] a few days ago, so another case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon[2]!<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery</a><p>2. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion</a>
What did you use for the map ? Mapbox ??
CartoDB and Leaflet. Source is available here btw: <a href="https://github.com/montanaflynn/ishormuzopenyet" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/montanaflynn/ishormuzopenyet</a>
As an OpenStreetMap-contributor: you have to add attribution as per our license agreement: <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright" rel="nofollow">https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright</a><p>CartoDB packages this data into tiles you can use, but that doesn't lift this requirement.
Looks like it's using leaflet + map tiles from <a href="https://carto.com/" rel="nofollow">https://carto.com/</a><p>I think Mapbox also provides a similar looking basemap style.
So apparently the reason they don’t just go for it is due to insurance. Because Iran technically isn’t suppose to just sink a civilian vessel, but the risk is there so the ships are ordered by the owner/stakeholder not to go due to the insurance coverage. Kind of interesting, they could technically call Iran’s bluff but it would mean, they violate the insurance contract and lose coverage? I’m just reading about this so probably not the full picture.
The capability is very real. And they don't have to sink the ship, just one Shahed drone exploding on the deck and injuring/killing a sailor is deterrence enough.
No insurance has been fixed for a while now. Its as simple as shipowners not wanting to lose their boats and their future earnings potential.
I think there’s difference between A) whether ships are traversing the straight, and B) whether the straight is open / closed / could be traversed.<p>It’s very well possible that the straight is safe, but the vessels are unnecessarily cautious.
Totally, and I've heard a lot of it comes down to insurance!<p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-08/shippers-rush-for-hormuz-insurance-after-ceasefire-broker-says" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-08/shippers-...</a>
I'm not really very up to speed on this, can someone explain how the strait is actually closed? Are the Iranians threatening to sink any ships that pass by, or what? How come any ships don't turn their transponders off and try to make a run for it?
> How come any ships don't turn their transponders off and try to make a run for it?<p>Because the cost of failure is death and the crew aren’t going to risk it, and the other cost of failure is a couple hundred million dollars in ship and cargo and the insurance companies aren’t going to risk it either. This is like asking why your DoorDash driver wouldn’t just try to run the police blockade to get you your burrito.
They’ll sink ships or cause damage with low cost drones or missles<p>The strait isn’t wide enough, Iran can see any ships attempting
From what I was reading Iran likely wouldn’t sink a civilian vessel but because the risk is there due to the threat they don’t do it because it would violate the contact for their maritime insurance, meaning even if you had a brave crew and orders to go, you lose all your insurance coverage against the loss if something goes wrong.
I'm sure tankers are huge and show up easily on naval radars.
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IRGC targeting systems have entered the chat.
Iran (and various news sources) have claimed that the straights are not now, and in fact never have been, closed - provided the relevant ship was not involved/linked to the attacks on Iran, and that it coordinated with Iranian authorities.<p>So, it could be that:<p>* Iran is lying and that has not actually been an option.<p>* A lot of the ships which would otherwise have transitioned are involved with the war somehow.<p>* The relevant parties have decided not to coordinate transitions with Iran, for various reasons<p>* The data displayed at the link is partial for some reason.
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It was mentioned in this thread and quickly flagged, but Israel broke the ceasefire today by attacking civilians in Lebanon so Iran closed the straight. It was open prior to the ceasefire violation.<p>France's Macron actually just commented on this: <a href="https://x.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/2041990505760772551" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/2041990505760772551</a>
1. Israel attacked Hezbollah in Lebanon: <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-launches-largest-airstrikes-yet-against-hezbollah-after-truce-with-iran/" rel="nofollow">https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-launches-largest-airstrike...</a><p>2. There is and was no ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel. There was no violation of the ceasefire between Iran and the US/Israel.<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/us-did-not-agree-that-ceasefire-would-cover-lebanon-vance-says-2026-04-08/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/us-did-not-agree-...</a><p>Macron: "I reiterated the need to preserve Lebanon’s territorial integrity and France’s determination to support the efforts of the Lebanese authorities to uphold the country’s sovereignty and implement the Hezbollah disarmament plan."<p>So Macron and Israel are perfectly aligned. Both are demanding that Hezbollah is disarmed and the Lebanese government will assert its sovereignty. Once that happens there will be no need for Israel to use force but as long as Israeli civilians are bombarded non-stop from Lebanon Israel is going to hit back - hard.
> Israel broke the ceasefire<p>Correct me if I'm wrong, but Israel didn't sign any ceasefire. The ceasefire was between Iran and US. Israel separately announced (not part of any deal) that it would stop attacking Iran. It honored that self-imposed limit. Israel attacked Lebanon (Iran's proxy).
israels only option is to get america involved since they cant achieve their goals by themselves. trump unwittingly got a punch in the face last time he let himself get dragged in so doubt hell go 100% in again, maybe just lip service attacks to try and appease israel while backchannel appologising profusely to iran as he does it lol