The barrel and the basket.

Risk and Route tracks how disruptions to global maritime shipping reach the prices people pay for everyday goods and fuel. We pull real-time vessel tracking, commodity futures, Federal Reserve indicators, and geopolitical news into one dashboard, then turn it into indices and reviewed analysis.

Take the spring 2026 oil shock. Crude ran past $100 a barrel in April, then fell hard through the summer as the acute Hormuz risk drained out, and our Route Disruption Index followed it down from above 80 toward the high 40s. The pump eventually caught some of that relief. The grocery aisle mostly did not, because coffee kept climbing on its own supply story and the freight costs that ratcheted up during the scare never fully ratcheted back. Following that gap, between the price of the barrel and the price of the basket, is the whole point of the site.

No existing product does this systematically for the household. FreightWaves covers logistics for industry professionals. MarineTraffic tracks vessels for traders. Bloomberg and the WSJ write about shipping’s consumer impact reactively, during crises. Risk and Route runs continuously, in plain terms, connecting what happens on the ocean to what happens at the register.

Our Approach

We publish a small set of indices: the Route Disruption Index, the Household Fuel Risk Index, the Consumer Checkout Index, and per-chokepoint Severity Scores. Each estimates how shipping pressure transmits into consumer categories over time. They are model estimates, on a 0–100 scale, and we say so. We do not just show ship dots on a map. We build transmission models that connect shipping cost to your grocery bill, and we let the scores fall when the inputs fall.

Transparency

Our data sources are public, and the actual index equations, weights and all, live on our Methodology page. You can read exactly how the RDI weighs news, chokepoints, freight, and crude, and why Hormuz carries no vessel term. Our Forecast Scorecard tracks what we predicted against what actually happened, because accountability matters more than appearing infallible.

Our Process

Risk and Route collects, analyzes, and synthesizes data from public APIs across vessel tracking, commodity markets, economic indicators, and geopolitical event monitoring. The indices are computed algorithmically from the documented formulas. Written analysis is produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor before it publishes. When the data revises, the numbers revise with it.