This is a nice overview, but please remove the PolyMarket indicator. It is an obscene prediction mechanism as it creates horrible financial incentives to a war situation. Its degenerate effects have been featured here before. [1]
Let's not condone "measurements" that are effectively ways for people to gain money on important political decisions, affecting the lives of many people.
Actually yes. I put my money in things I would like to see shape the future, which I think investment should be about; shaping the future.
But disregarding this admittedly niche attitude; it's not the same thing. If you're opening bets on the ships being bombed before a certain date, you're opening incentives for people to do so. Although buying OIL or Palantir is morally questionably, it does not create such direct incentives.
Oil futures or any other commodity purchase that doesn't result in the buyer taking actual physical ownership of what they purchase is an obscene gambling market with perverse incentives yes correct.
Well, it would be if everyone betting wouldn't have an influence on the outcome. That's "wisdom of the crowds". But what if the people putting money on the Strait being closed are the same that close them? Surely, that's no longer the wisdom of the crowds at play. Just perverse incentives.
Who could have foreseen that a government/person would actually blatantly start a war, and manipulate bombing raids in order to manipulate a market, without being charged with a crime himself.
In sports betting, it seems obvious if a player throws a game.
In a war? Surely nobody would do this, right? Who could imagine it.
You don't have to imagine some giant conspiracy. Fact is, that everyone can make a bet, and there are a lot of people with knowledge and influence in the political decisions made.
In sports, at least the outcome is only effected by the sportsmen. Here, who knows which and how many people have inside knowledge and influence that they can use that to their financial advantage?
Yeah.
I have to agree. My view has changed in last week.
I never imagined that markets could be so corrupted by those in power, without some other consequences somehow balancing out. Like being arrested, or removed from office.
Forget PolyMarket.
We literally have bets being made on oil futures, directly before a tweet by the president. Openly profiting on direct minute by minute manipulation. Openly corrupt.
The data being ~4 days delayed does kind of make this less useful. It is a nice concept and cool to see the historical data though. Just think the domain and the large "NO" doesn't really fit with the lack of current data.
Totally agree, I put some text and tried to make it clear. My first intention was to find some live ship tracking API and see how many ships cross the strait, but they were all hundreds of dollars a month, and behind enterprise contact forms.
I've done some small scale ship tracking in the past, and yeah, anything beyond finding a specific ship while it is near the shore is stupid expensive.
You can actually see in the last 24 hours it jumped up with the ceasefire and Iran saying they would open it and fell back with reports it's been shut down again easlier today.
Edit: I added this, I can see a few downvotes, happy to discuss here or in the github repo if anyone has strong feelings on it!
I mean you obviously could, the url is a little harder to remember and it doesn't have crossing data. This was just a small fun project I did, so you're free to do whatever you like. The reason I thought of using polymarket data is I didn't have live ship tracking data which is what I originally intended to use.
I believe NASA / EU provide daily satellite imagery for free (which is of relatively high quality too). I wonder if there's a way to take that data, and training some kind of image recognition model that figures out "movement" or something to the same end? Would be cool to see
Funnily enough, I did find a few satellite sources at the beginning for the map background and noticed that all the ships seemed to be scrubbed from the image. It's an interesting idea, thanks for the comment!
The sources I used were:
- ESRI World Imagery[1] — free satellite tiles, high-res, but ships are stripped out from the imagery
- NASA GIBS - VIIRS[2] — near real-time daily satellite imagery from NASA, but resolution is ~375m so ships aren't visible anyway
- Mapbox Satellite[3] — high-res and looks great, but same deal — ships are scrubbed from the composited imagery
I think you can see these vessel detections at https://app.skylight.earth/ ("Try out a limited version as a guest") but they seem to be delayed by 48 hours.
VIIRS is very low resolution but you can make out vessels with reasonable accuracy in the night-time images.
According to the Financial Times (1), the straight is "open" but Iran is extorting fees for passing ships.
> "Iran will demand that shipping companies pay tolls in cryptocurrency for oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, as it seeks to retain control over passage through the key waterway during the two-week ceasefire."
If they really will start doing so for all shipping, that would be odd since the straight itself is in Oman's territorial waters. Even so, the UNCLOS convention (2) requires free transit:
> Article 44
> Duties of States bordering straits
>
> States bordering straits shall not hamper transit passage and shall give appropriate publicity to any danger to navigation or overflight within or over the strait of which they have knowledge. There shall be no suspension of transit passage.
It would be unprecedented and unlawful, but I guess previous actions of Israel, the US and Iran have shown our world is beyond adhering to laws and agreements now.
It's super hard to tell what's actually happening. Because I've seen other reports that Iran state media halted traffic earlier today, as reported by Washington Post[1]:
> With Trump and Iran each claiming victory, but still far apart on key issues, traffic in the Strait of Hormuz remained at a standstill Wednesday.
Wow thanks, there's not really any dm functionality on hn and I didn't see a clear social handle in your profile. https://github.com/montanaflynn/ has my email.
Very cool! I love one off intresting sites like this. Thanks for building it and talking a little bit about where the data comes from etc.
On the note of Ai agent getting the data for you, could you not just build a chrome extention that intercepts/read the api response and then uploads it to whatever ingest endpoint you have? You could probably just call their api end points they use on the page as well but not sure what protections they have so might be a bit tricky. A custom chrome extention could do it though if they have protections.
Their APIs are protected by cloudflare, I didn't want to circumvent that. Also I dont really want to make a chrome extension or have a browster tab open, if that's what you meant? I've already made a cron style agent framework[1] so that's what I'd probably reach for since they can actually open the browser and inspect the network traffic to grab the json.
I think I was just spit-balling what would be possible, rather than what I intend to do. As mentioned elsewhere I'm hoping to get an API key from one the data providers, I even reached out to the api behind marinetraffic.com, https://www.kpler.com/product/maritime/data-services to see if they would sponsor the project.
This was just something I built on a whim, but I appreciate your comment and took it to heart!
I work for a consultancy that does vessel tracking as one of its main products, and yeah it's expensive! afaik they have remote teams with sensors at key points and a bunch of people using AI/software to manage things like GPS spoofing. So it's all pretty guarded proprietary stuff.
It always amazed me they made ships that just fit the Panama canal. I went though the locks years ago, it was quite a trip (and how a friend got met to go on a cruise)
Yes, but in circumstances where no war is in the offing, digging a giant hole next to 50km of open water begs questions. It would be impossible to get "it's a hedge against the future" over the line.
The same to a lesser extent applies to pipes. You could construct pipes for gas, for some of the heavier oils and crude (what I read suggests pumping crude long distance is painful, it has to be down-mixed with lighter stuff to make it sufficiently fluid) but the fertilizer? that would mean converting dry to wet and back again (nobody ships fluid weight if they can avoid it) -Or ship the inputs: ammonia, and sulphur in some liquid form, and produce the dry goods on the other side.
But, I think pipes have a stronger case than a canal: move the things which are amenable to pipes, into pipes, and bury the pipes.
In times past, this would have been done as a convoy. China and other nations would have stepped to the fore, conducting safe passage with their own ships on the outside edge. But we're not in a world where this kind of thing works for anyone involved. Even offering to cover insurance risk doesn't look to have motivated ship owners to pass. (in times past, the US wouldn't have put itself or it's allies in this position, hence the reference to China)
Don't be fooled by mental images of what a convoy looks like: ships like these maintain massive separation. There's almost suction between hulls moving at this scale, if they were within 500m of each other there'd be chaos if one had to take any evasive action. In reality (I believe) even a convoy consists of a a lot of discrete, clearly demarked and targetable things, not a large mass you can "hide" in.
If the fertiliser production has a point in manufacture when the fluid is amenable to transport, then for sure, that would make sense.
And you are right, if the same amount of capital and energy was invested in Solar/Wind as in Oil, we'd be in a totally different world. It's cents to dollars, considering the size of the tail AND the current investment.
Here in Australia the problem is the royalty stream to the states. Oil and Gas windfalls when the price of equivalent supply (brent crude I believe for oil, not sure what LNG world price defines the limit) hits $100 is just amazing. The revenue stream to the states is enormous. Their motivation to transfer money into alternatives, instead of sucking on the teat, is zero. States without significant oil revenue seem to do more (SA) -States isolated from the national grid seem to do more (WA) but a site with both high insolation, and good wind, but also massive oil, gas and coal fields (Qld) does as little as possible. It's political reductionism. The crony economy is huge, Mining funds the government and the government reflects mining sector interests over all others.
Really liked this. Made me laugh even if not intentionally funny.
Also, given how markets and news cycles are moved with words not actions these days, I really like this site.
There are still so many misaligned interests; this is a much tougher situation that may get some local stability for a period, but will likely return to chaos again.
Fair enough, I'm actually not scraping it on any automated cycle currently, I just manually copied the JSON from their site to get some ships on the map.
There's a few live ship tracking APIs I considered but they are expensive or their free offering just straight up didn't work. I sent a few an email if they would consider sponsoring the project, no replies yet.
- AISStream.io — https://aisstream.io — Down/not working
- DataDocked — https://datadocked.com — Ran out of credits on a single failed request
- VesselFinder — https://www.vesselfinder.com/realtime-ais-data — Enterprise contact form, asked if they wanted to sponsor in exchange for a link
- MarineTraffic — https://www.marinetraffic.com, their API is like an enterprise contact form, same as above, waiting for response.
It says US-Israel Bloc military deaths - 74. Iran military deaths - 10,500 It has no information what is the source of information. Seems like made up numbers.
So if it's under 25% of the prior year's crossing it goes to NO, otherwise it's counted as open.
The update cadence kinda sucks because I didn't spring for the $200 a month live ship tracking data, so I'm using https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a... which lags by 4 days which isn't great for a site like this, but was fine for me on a little side project. Open to other data sources or ideas, of if anyone wants to sponsor an API key (I did reach out to a few vendors already if they would give the project api key in exchange for a link to their site).
The original idea was to track ships and see how many crossed the strait but as mentioned above I didn't find any free sources so I went with what I did.
This will be inherently inaccurate because data was based on public AIS signal, but ships are turning off their AIS to avoid detection.
> In an attempt to evade detection, many ships appear to be deliberately switching off their tracking system - known as AIS (Automatic Identification System).
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4geg0eeyjeo
Another funny thing about this was this morning I checked if the domain isthestraitofhormuzopenyet.com was available and it was, and by the time I made the site locally, put it on vercel I went to buy the domain to point DNS to it someone had bought it! I renamed it to the current site url / repo which i think might be a little nicer to type, but crazy that we had same idea on apparently the same day. I was also just telling a friend about simultaneous invention aka multiple discover[1] a few days ago, so another case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon[2]!
Thank you for this comment, I just fixed it[1], don't know why claude code decided to hide it, I actually should have known this requirement and checked!
So apparently the reason they don’t just go for it is due to insurance. Because Iran technically isn’t suppose to just sink a civilian vessel, but the risk is there so the ships are ordered by the owner/stakeholder not to go due to the insurance coverage. Kind of interesting, they could technically call Iran’s bluff but it would mean, they violate the insurance contract and lose coverage? I’m just reading about this so probably not the full picture.
The capability is very real. And they don't have to sink the ship, just one Shahed drone exploding on the deck and injuring/killing a sailor is deterrence enough.
The Shahed drone is a 'set it and forget it' device where you program a stationary target and launch it. It would not work well for moving targets, like ships.
It was mentioned in this thread and quickly flagged, but Israel broke the ceasefire today by attacking civilians in Lebanon so Iran closed the straight. It was open prior to the ceasefire violation.
Macron: "I reiterated the need to preserve Lebanon’s territorial integrity and France’s determination to support the efforts of the Lebanese authorities to uphold the country’s sovereignty and implement the Hezbollah disarmament plan."
So Macron and Israel are perfectly aligned. Both are demanding that Hezbollah is disarmed and the Lebanese government will assert its sovereignty. Once that happens there will be no need for Israel to use force but as long as Israeli civilians are bombarded non-stop from Lebanon Israel is going to hit back - hard.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Israel didn't sign any ceasefire. The ceasefire was between Iran and US. Israel separately announced (not part of any deal) that it would stop attacking Iran. It honored that self-imposed limit. Israel attacked Lebanon (Iran's proxy).
israels only option is to get america involved since they cant achieve their goals by themselves. trump unwittingly got a punch in the face last time he let himself get dragged in so doubt hell go 100% in again, maybe just lip service attacks to try and appease israel while backchannel appologising profusely to iran as he does it lol
edit: actually im likely completely wrong, what i wrote above is what i hope would be the case but sadly in reality the violence will never end and oil prices will go up and up and up. this is just a temporary blip. the fighting will continue until something more substantial happens to sort it out in favour of one side or the other.
I'm not really very up to speed on this, can someone explain how the strait is actually closed? Are the Iranians threatening to sink any ships that pass by, or what? How come any ships don't turn their transponders off and try to make a run for it?
> How come any ships don't turn their transponders off and try to make a run for it?
Because the cost of failure is death and the crew aren’t going to risk it, and the other cost of failure is a couple hundred million dollars in ship and cargo and the insurance companies aren’t going to risk it either. This is like asking why your DoorDash driver wouldn’t just try to run the police blockade to get you your burrito.
Kattegat where I live is probably double the width of Hormuz and if you're in a small ship you can probably sail most of those 140 km. Not without risk, but you'd be relatively safe for the most part. Big ships can't though, so even though there might be 50km on each side of them they could potentially have a shipping lane which is only a few hundred meters wide.
I can't say that I know anything about Iran, but if we were to close our straits off so you couldn't enter the north sea from the baltic sea then our navy would rapidly deploy various different mines that lay on the bottom on the shallower parts and control the shipping lanes with things like suicide drones. I imagine Iran would do something similar, only they've probably been preparing for it a lot more than we have.
From what I was reading Iran likely wouldn’t sink a civilian vessel but because the risk is there due to the threat they don’t do it because it would violate the contact for their maritime insurance, meaning even if you had a brave crew and orders to go, you lose all your insurance coverage against the loss if something goes wrong.
Iran (and various news sources) have claimed that the straights are not now, and in fact never have been, closed - provided the relevant ship was not involved/linked to the attacks on Iran, and that it coordinated with Iranian authorities.
So, it could be that:
* Iran is lying and that has not actually been an option.
* A lot of the ships which would otherwise have transitioned are involved with the war somehow.
* The relevant parties have decided not to coordinate transitions with Iran, for various reasons
* The data displayed at the link is partial for some reason.
No need for baseless speculation, it's well known that no insurance company is willing to insure transit through the straight while it's an active war zone.
Not the first time they couldn't keep to a ceasefire for even a day, let alone 24 hours. Exactly the same as what happened with Palestine last year as well.
Let's not condone "measurements" that are effectively ways for people to gain money on important political decisions, affecting the lives of many people.
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397822
But disregarding this admittedly niche attitude; it's not the same thing. If you're opening bets on the ships being bombed before a certain date, you're opening incentives for people to do so. Although buying OIL or Palantir is morally questionably, it does not create such direct incentives.
And yet, it is the wisdom of the crowds. The crowds being obscene.
Aren't we all constantly hitting re-fresh for updates, and making predictions.
The prediction markets are just consolidating that 'desire'.
Who could have foreseen that a government/person would actually blatantly start a war, and manipulate bombing raids in order to manipulate a market, without being charged with a crime himself.
In sports betting, it seems obvious if a player throws a game.
In a war? Surely nobody would do this, right? Who could imagine it.
In sports, at least the outcome is only effected by the sportsmen. Here, who knows which and how many people have inside knowledge and influence that they can use that to their financial advantage?
I never imagined that markets could be so corrupted by those in power, without some other consequences somehow balancing out. Like being arrested, or removed from office.
Forget PolyMarket. We literally have bets being made on oil futures, directly before a tweet by the president. Openly profiting on direct minute by minute manipulation. Openly corrupt.
https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-return...
My approach would be if that jumps up to 75%+ it would change to YES. And if we get into May they have one for then too:
https://polymarket.com/event/strait-of-hormuz-traffic-return...
You can actually see in the last 24 hours it jumped up with the ceasefire and Iran saying they would open it and fell back with reports it's been shut down again easlier today.
Edit: I added this, I can see a few downvotes, happy to discuss here or in the github repo if anyone has strong feelings on it!
The sources I used were:
- ESRI World Imagery[1] — free satellite tiles, high-res, but ships are stripped out from the imagery
- NASA GIBS - VIIRS[2] — near real-time daily satellite imagery from NASA, but resolution is ~375m so ships aren't visible anyway
- Mapbox Satellite[3] — high-res and looks great, but same deal — ships are scrubbed from the composited imagery
1. https://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_I... 2. https://earthdata.nasa.gov/engage/open-data-services-softwar... 3. https://www.mapbox.com
- Sentinel-2: https://github.com/allenai/rslearn_projects/blob/master/docs...
- Landsat: https://github.com/allenai/rslearn_projects/blob/master/docs...
- VIIRS Nighttime Lights: https://github.com/allenai/vessel-detection-viirs
I think you can see these vessel detections at https://app.skylight.earth/ ("Try out a limited version as a guest") but they seem to be delayed by 48 hours.
VIIRS is very low resolution but you can make out vessels with reasonable accuracy in the night-time images.
> "Iran will demand that shipping companies pay tolls in cryptocurrency for oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, as it seeks to retain control over passage through the key waterway during the two-week ceasefire."
If they really will start doing so for all shipping, that would be odd since the straight itself is in Oman's territorial waters. Even so, the UNCLOS convention (2) requires free transit:
> Article 44 > Duties of States bordering straits > > States bordering straits shall not hamper transit passage and shall give appropriate publicity to any danger to navigation or overflight within or over the strait of which they have knowledge. There shall be no suspension of transit passage.
It would be unprecedented and unlawful, but I guess previous actions of Israel, the US and Iran have shown our world is beyond adhering to laws and agreements now.
(1) https://www.ft.com/content/02aefac4-ea62-48db-9326-c0da373b1... (2) United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea: https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unc...
Didn't Trump float the Idea of a joint venture with Iran on the Fees?
Amazing, that once you could make money on a toll, Trump was "there is profit in peace? lets get this peace thing going"
> With Trump and Iran each claiming victory, but still far apart on key issues, traffic in the Strait of Hormuz remained at a standstill Wednesday.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/04/08/trump-iran-w...
On the note of Ai agent getting the data for you, could you not just build a chrome extention that intercepts/read the api response and then uploads it to whatever ingest endpoint you have? You could probably just call their api end points they use on the page as well but not sure what protections they have so might be a bit tricky. A custom chrome extention could do it though if they have protections.
1. https://botctl.dev/
This was just something I built on a whim, but I appreciate your comment and took it to heart!
Great bit of topical datavis here.
https://i.imgflip.com/aopmmf.jpg
Moving to a topographic view, it becomes clear the neck of land at "two seas view" is narrow, but tall. It would literally be moving a mountain.
Panamax and suezmax boats are smaller than ULCC supertankers.
Ferdinand De Lesseps time has passed. This would be ruinously expensive. Better to negotiate with rational intent.
https://aramcomjean.smugmug.com/Panama-Canal/i-94PDM8F/A
I bet it could have been done with the money spent on the "war"
The same to a lesser extent applies to pipes. You could construct pipes for gas, for some of the heavier oils and crude (what I read suggests pumping crude long distance is painful, it has to be down-mixed with lighter stuff to make it sufficiently fluid) but the fertilizer? that would mean converting dry to wet and back again (nobody ships fluid weight if they can avoid it) -Or ship the inputs: ammonia, and sulphur in some liquid form, and produce the dry goods on the other side.
But, I think pipes have a stronger case than a canal: move the things which are amenable to pipes, into pipes, and bury the pipes.
In times past, this would have been done as a convoy. China and other nations would have stepped to the fore, conducting safe passage with their own ships on the outside edge. But we're not in a world where this kind of thing works for anyone involved. Even offering to cover insurance risk doesn't look to have motivated ship owners to pass. (in times past, the US wouldn't have put itself or it's allies in this position, hence the reference to China)
Don't be fooled by mental images of what a convoy looks like: ships like these maintain massive separation. There's almost suction between hulls moving at this scale, if they were within 500m of each other there'd be chaos if one had to take any evasive action. In reality (I believe) even a convoy consists of a a lot of discrete, clearly demarked and targetable things, not a large mass you can "hide" in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_traffic_separation_sch... (and a lot of links off this)
On the other hand, fertilizer is fluid -- either ammonia or ureal ammonium nitrate.
And you are right, if the same amount of capital and energy was invested in Solar/Wind as in Oil, we'd be in a totally different world. It's cents to dollars, considering the size of the tail AND the current investment.
Here in Australia the problem is the royalty stream to the states. Oil and Gas windfalls when the price of equivalent supply (brent crude I believe for oil, not sure what LNG world price defines the limit) hits $100 is just amazing. The revenue stream to the states is enormous. Their motivation to transfer money into alternatives, instead of sucking on the teat, is zero. States without significant oil revenue seem to do more (SA) -States isolated from the national grid seem to do more (WA) but a site with both high insolation, and good wind, but also massive oil, gas and coal fields (Qld) does as little as possible. It's political reductionism. The crony economy is huge, Mining funds the government and the government reflects mining sector interests over all others.
Also, given how markets and news cycles are moved with words not actions these days, I really like this site.
There are still so many misaligned interests; this is a much tougher situation that may get some local stability for a period, but will likely return to chaos again.
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/p/terms
There's a few live ship tracking APIs I considered but they are expensive or their free offering just straight up didn't work. I sent a few an email if they would consider sponsoring the project, no replies yet.
And wtf is a _fishing_ ship from Panama doing in the middle of the straight?
What's the threshold function? Do you have graduating `No --> Partially --> Mostly --> Open`?
Also what's the update cadence?
The update cadence kinda sucks because I didn't spring for the $200 a month live ship tracking data, so I'm using https://portwatch.imf.org/pages/cb5856222a5b4105adc6ee7e880a... which lags by 4 days which isn't great for a site like this, but was fine for me on a little side project. Open to other data sources or ideas, of if anyone wants to sponsor an API key (I did reach out to a few vendors already if they would give the project api key in exchange for a link to their site).
The original idea was to track ships and see how many crossed the strait but as mentioned above I didn't find any free sources so I went with what I did.
> In an attempt to evade detection, many ships appear to be deliberately switching off their tracking system - known as AIS (Automatic Identification System). https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4geg0eeyjeo
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
CartoDB packages this data into tiles you can use, but that doesn't lift this requirement.
1. https://github.com/montanaflynn/ishormuzopenyet/commit/70a8c...
Seems like we can't use them for free, even with attribution, unless I get a grant?
I think Mapbox also provides a similar looking basemap style.
It’s very well possible that the straight is safe, but the vessels are unnecessarily cautious.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-08/shippers-...
France's Macron actually just commented on this: https://x.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/2041990505760772551
2. There is and was no ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel. There was no violation of the ceasefire between Iran and the US/Israel.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/us-did-not-agree-...
Macron: "I reiterated the need to preserve Lebanon’s territorial integrity and France’s determination to support the efforts of the Lebanese authorities to uphold the country’s sovereignty and implement the Hezbollah disarmament plan."
So Macron and Israel are perfectly aligned. Both are demanding that Hezbollah is disarmed and the Lebanese government will assert its sovereignty. Once that happens there will be no need for Israel to use force but as long as Israeli civilians are bombarded non-stop from Lebanon Israel is going to hit back - hard.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Israel didn't sign any ceasefire. The ceasefire was between Iran and US. Israel separately announced (not part of any deal) that it would stop attacking Iran. It honored that self-imposed limit. Israel attacked Lebanon (Iran's proxy).
edit: actually im likely completely wrong, what i wrote above is what i hope would be the case but sadly in reality the violence will never end and oil prices will go up and up and up. this is just a temporary blip. the fighting will continue until something more substantial happens to sort it out in favour of one side or the other.
Because the cost of failure is death and the crew aren’t going to risk it, and the other cost of failure is a couple hundred million dollars in ship and cargo and the insurance companies aren’t going to risk it either. This is like asking why your DoorDash driver wouldn’t just try to run the police blockade to get you your burrito.
I can't say that I know anything about Iran, but if we were to close our straits off so you couldn't enter the north sea from the baltic sea then our navy would rapidly deploy various different mines that lay on the bottom on the shallower parts and control the shipping lanes with things like suicide drones. I imagine Iran would do something similar, only they've probably been preparing for it a lot more than we have.
The strait isn’t wide enough, Iran can see any ships attempting
So, it could be that:
* Iran is lying and that has not actually been an option.
* A lot of the ships which would otherwise have transitioned are involved with the war somehow.
* The relevant parties have decided not to coordinate transitions with Iran, for various reasons
* The data displayed at the link is partial for some reason.
They are obsessed with wars, murders, and chaos