Red Sea detours, port queues and freight rates
Papers on port congestion, freight rates and the Red Sea crisis doubled to 58 in the last year, in operations research and economics journals alike. When ships went around the Cape, capacity vanished into longer voyages and queues moved from port to port. How much of the freight-rate spike was distance, and how much was congestion?
What prompted this#
Since October 2025, 58 papers carry a port-congestion, container-terminal, freight-rate, Red Sea crisis or Suez Canal keyword, up from 27 in the year before: "port congestion" on 17, "container terminal operations" on 16, "freight rates" on 10, "freight rate volatility" on 8, "Red Sea crisis" on 7. Thirty-one appeared in operations research journals and 22 in economics journals. Over three years they sit next to berth allocation (16), container shipping (9), AIS data (6) and shipping alliances (6); only 3 of 116 carry an AI keyword. After attacks on ships in the Red Sea from late 2023, many container services re-routed around the Cape of Good Hope. A related note looks at slow steaming and the port queue; this one asks what the detour did to the network.
Questions#
- How much of the 2024 freight-rate spike came from longer voyages absorbing capacity, and how much from congestion at ports?
- Did waiting times travel along the network, from Asia–Europe services to Mediterranean transshipment hubs?
- Did shipping alliances reshuffle their services, and did freight rates pass into import prices and inflation?
Data that could help#
AIS vessel positions (port calls and time at anchor), container freight indices such as the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index, and UNCTAD port call statistics.
Next step#
With AIS data, measure time at anchor at the main European and Mediterranean container ports before and after December 2023, and relate it to each port's share of re-routed services.