Membership

What stays free, permanently

The measured analysis is published, in full, and is meant to be read and quoted. None of this is ever going behind anything:

• The hour-by-hour figures — which hours are fastest and slowest, and by how much.
• The effect of sunset on traffic and on transit times.
• The finding that recreational crowding is not what drives your transit time, and what does.
• The commercial-priority effect: a commercial lockage in the 15 minutes before you arrive raises median transit from 26 minutes to 42.
• The full strategy write-up, the loading order, and the procedure for locking through.
• The Ship Canal bridge schedule and its effect on masted vessels.
• The event and holiday calendar.

Transit time, here and throughout the site, means arrival to clearing the chamber — the roughly 18-minute lockage included, not queue time alone. The queue itself, arrival to the doors closing, runs about 8 minutes at the median.

What membership will cover

The published figures are a dated snapshot — one closed 30-day window, 30 July to 28 August 2026, in high summer. Membership is the live layer: not what was true in August, but what is true this afternoon.

• The state-conditioned floor — given how long ago the doors last closed, right now, what the fastest and typical boats in that exact situation achieved. This is the largest lever in the data and the one you cannot memorise, because it changes with every cycle of the doors.
• The live commercial-conflict call: which vessel is inbound, when, and what it costs you.
• The 24-hour outlook with interquartile bands, scaled to how today is actually running rather than to the monthly average.
• Current-window charts — the last 7 days and the last 24 hours, not the published August snapshot.
• The full record set behind all of it.

Why it will not be free forever

Two reasons, and the second is the honest one.

The first is cost: a camera watcher runs continuously, AIS access is metered, and the archive has to be kept.

The second is that live timing advice is partly rivalrous. A gap in the schedule is a gap because most boats are not in it. If everyone moves on the same signal at the same moment, the signal stops being true — so the number of people acting on the live layer has to stay modest for it to be worth acting on at all. That is an unusual thing for a product to admit, but it is the actual reason.

Membership will be capped

It follows from the above: places are limited, and when they are gone the answer is a waiting list rather than a larger number. This is not a sales device. It is the same logic as the paragraph above — a live signal that everyone is acting on is no longer a live signal, and the only way to keep the thing worth paying for is to keep the roster small enough that it stays true.

Places free up as annual terms lapse, which is the main reason membership renews yearly rather than being bought once. If the cap is reached, joining the list costs nothing and you will be told when a place opens.

The measured analysis published on this site — the hour-by-hour figures, the commercial-priority effect, the cycle-position numbers — is not capped and not behind anything. It is free to read, free to quote, and it stays that way. What is capped is the live layer: current conditions, and what to do about them right now.

How it will work

No account and no password. You pay once a year through Stripe, and your browser holds a signed token that says you are a member. If you clear your cookies or change device, you enter the email address that paid and a fresh link is sent to it — Stripe is the only record, so there is no user database to breach and nothing to remember.

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