A study into the capacity constraints of the primary east-west maritime gateway has tossed up some interesting numbers.
There is only one real way to get ocean cargo from China to Europe, or from India to Japan, and that is to send it via the Malacca and Singapore straits.
It is one of the busiest trade lanes in the world, even in the shipping downturn. Singapore isn’t called a maritime hub for nothing.
In an exercise to assess the capacity needs of the Malacca and Singapore straits when trade increases, the Maritime Authority of Singapore (MPA) recently hauled out the 2007 data and fired up their computer simulation machine.
After blowing the dust off the 2007 numbers and feeding them into the hungry computer, the MPA announced that the Singapore Strait, which saw more than 257,000 vessel movements (transits and arrivals) in that year, could safely accommodate a 75 percent increase in vessel traffic.
That means an incredible 450,000 vessels a year can come and go, or 1,232 a day, without bumping into each other. That was only the Singapore section of the passage. Factor in the Malacca Strait vessel numbers for 2007, add 75 percent, and you have almost 2,000 vessel movements a day.
That is a lot of ships to be floating through a channel than is just 2,150m wide at its narrowest point south of St John’s Island in the Singapore Strait.
The MPA concludes “there is still substantial room for vessel traffic growth in the straits without affecting either efficiency or navigational safety”.
That is good news for the futue. The trade downturn will slow the traffic growth for now, but it will pick up sooner or later. And when it does, we hope the hundreds of empty ghost ships off southern Malaysia and Singapore that are bobbing around in that purgatory between trade lane reinstatement and the scrapyard will have hauled anchor and disappeared.
They may not be hazardous to navigation, but they are ugly reminders of how quickly fortunes can change in the tragically cyclical shipping business.