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You are correct, I was referring to that Vancouver-Panama routing. The more I look at the map, the more I think it does have something to do with some aspect o

You are correct, I was referring to that Vancouver-Panama routing. The more I look at the map, the more I think it does have something to do with some aspect of US jurisdiction - at first I thought the phenomenon was limited to the west coast, but it looks like there’s a hint of it off the east coast as well. And the waters around Hawaii look suspiciously empty (other than traffic that’s Hawaii-bound) compared to the entire rest of the pacific. To my eyes, I don’t see clear evidence of the same phenomenon occurring anywhere else in the world. Good thought on checking a vessel tracker to see which ships are using that route and whether there are any evident commonalities.

dredmorbius 2y ago
The thing about Hawaii is that there's very little that would pass by there unless it was going to or coming from Hawaii. So the idea that there's traffic around it heading in or out but not much else ... makes sense. There's extraordinarily little traffic across the mid-Pacific otherwise. (This has strong implications fro the island states of the Pacific as well: they've got great water access ... but nobody goes there. Places such as Pitcairn see very few vessels, similarly for the islands of the South Atlantic.) I'll see what I can dig up, you're nerd-sniping me.
- nocoiner 2y ago
  Agree that Hawaii is (gloriously) remote, but to my eye there still seems to be less shipping in its vicinity on average than there is in similarly remote areas of the Pacific. But I also just noticed I was misinterpreting the scale of the map and had substantially overestimated the breadth of Hawaiian archipelago, so the seeming absence of non-Hawaiian traffic could certainly be a function of, well, being smack in the middle of a giant ocean with not much else around. That said, another thing I noticed that makes me think could be a regulatorily driven pattern - there’s a quite noticeable void in the map around the Galapagos. I assume that’s some sort of environmental regulation, and vessels either route around (or turn off their transponders) due to that - wondering if there’s a reason to do the same in US waters that doesn’t really seem to hold true anywhere other than the US or the Galapagos.

dredmorbius 2y ago

The thing about Hawaii is that there's very little that would pass by there unless it was going to or coming from Hawaii. So the idea that there's traffic around it heading in or out but not much else ... makes sense. There's extraordinarily little traffic across the mid-Pacific otherwise. (This has strong implications fro the island states of the Pacific as well: they've got great water access ... but nobody goes there. Places such as Pitcairn see very few vessels, similarly for the islands of the South Atlantic.) I'll see what I can dig up, you're nerd-sniping me.

nocoiner 2y ago
Agree that Hawaii is (gloriously) remote, but to my eye there still seems to be less shipping in its vicinity on average than there is in similarly remote areas of the Pacific. But I also just noticed I was misinterpreting the scale of the map and had substantially overestimated the breadth of Hawaiian archipelago, so the seeming absence of non-Hawaiian traffic could certainly be a function of, well, being smack in the middle of a giant ocean with not much else around. That said, another thing I noticed that makes me think could be a regulatorily driven pattern - there’s a quite noticeable void in the map around the Galapagos. I assume that’s some sort of environmental regulation, and vessels either route around (or turn off their transponders) due to that - wondering if there’s a reason to do the same in US waters that doesn’t really seem to hold true anywhere other than the US or the Galapagos.