The chokepoints
Chokepoints
Almost everything that moves on the lakes squeezes through one of these 7 places. FreighterLog draws a line across each of them and records every crossing: 28,207 passages between January 2024 and December 2025.
Traffic by chokepoint
Every chokepoint
| Chokepoint | Directions | Passages | Vessels | Busiest day | Local time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soo Locks (St. Marys River) | upbound / downbound | 5,467 | 125 | Saturday, 30 March 2024 (17) | America/Detroit |
| Duluth Ship Canal | inbound / outbound | 1,383 | 70 | Monday, 8 July 2024 (10) | America/Chicago |
| Superior Entry | inbound / outbound | 941 | 54 | Thursday, 22 May 2025 (6) | America/Chicago |
| Straits of Mackinac | westbound / eastbound | 3,496 | 99 | Tuesday, 2 September 2025 (14) | America/Detroit |
| Port Huron / Blue Water Bridge | upbound / downbound | 6,474 | 145 | Tuesday, 25 November 2025 (22) | America/Detroit |
| Detroit River / Ambassador Bridge | downbound / upbound | 6,834 | 148 | Wednesday, 14 May 2025 (21) | America/Detroit |
| Welland Canal (Thorold) | downbound / upbound | 3,612 | 114 | Wednesday, 30 April 2025 (15) | America/Toronto |
Chokepoint pages live under /locks/. The word came first and the URLs were built on it; they stay where they are so nothing anyone has linked to breaks. Only two of these places are locks — the Soo and the Welland flight — and the rest are open water. "Chokepoint" is what the site calls all seven.
What a "passage" is here. Each chokepoint is a line drawn across the waterway. When a vessel's AIS track crosses that line, the crossing is recorded once, with a direction inferred from the heading. Lock queues, turns and re-crossings inside a three-hour window are collapsed into a single event, so a boat waiting its turn at the Soo is counted once, not four times.