Marine traffic survey is a fundamental part of marine traffic engineering. In the assessment of the safety or effectiveness in particular water areas, the distribution of ship tracks is always included as one of the most significant results of a marine traffic survey. In this paper, methods of marine traffic survey are discussed and an appropriate method is selected to obtain the traffic data considering the available research circumstances in China. A semi-automatic artificial way of plotting a distribution diagram of ship tracks is presented with illustrations. Details of the diagram plotted by using the collected traffic data are described for reference.