Shipping Lane
How formal are these?
A “shipping lane” or “sea lane” is, in a generic sense, the common path ships take to get from Point A to Point B. Technically, a ship can take whatever path that the laws of nature allow, but clearly, if you’re cruising from Lisbon to Rio, there’s likely a pretty common route you take – the shortest route between two points is a straight line
I couldn’t find much evidence that these are formal on the open sea, but, obviously, ships are going to fall into patterns. They might not travel single-file, but will generally follow each other across the ocean.
Where things get tricky is the chokepoints. There are formal chokepoints, like the canals, where ships literally have to wait in line and pay a fee to use the equipment. But then there are less formal chokepoints where there’s just a lot of ships in a small area.
The busiest such shipping lane in the world is the English Channel, particularly the section off the coast of Dover. It’s only 20 miles to France, and there are almost 200 ports up and down both coasts, with 500 or so ships transiting some portion of the channel every day.
Travel through the channel the “right” side – if you’re headed south, you stay on the English side, and if you’re heading north, you stay on the French side. This is known as a “Traffic Separation Scheme.” Ships having to cut across the lanes of traffic do so at as close to a 90-degree angle as possible.
Other busy shipping lanes are the Straits of Malacca around Singapore, and the Strait of Hormuz which separates the Persian Gulf from the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.
The Straits of Malacca, in particular, have a very formal system where ships have to report into a system called STRAITREP as they enter specific sectors of the waterway. Other areas have similar systems and processes.
Why I Looked It Up
I only had a vague concept of them. I was watching some science fiction movie where airships around a metropolis followed each other single file in orderly “lanes” in the sky. Unlike a wheeled vehicle that follows a road, these flying vehicles could go anywhere – like a ship – but they stayed in lanes to avoid hitting each other.
That got me wondering how formal shipping lanes were.