Alcohol-impaired driving fatalities

It is a curious fact, and one that says something rather depressing about our species, that the number of people dying in cars while drunk has risen in almost perfect tandem with the number of publicly available plugs where you can charge a battery-powered vehicle that theoretically makes drunk driving impossible. One might expect these two things to move in opposite directions, the way you'd expect hot and cold, or sense and the internet. But no. From 2010 to 2022, they climbed together like two hikers who've never met but somehow ended up on the same trail.

What's actually happening here is less a moral indictment and more a portrait of America's fundamental trajectory: both metrics were riding the same economic and demographic wave. As the country recovered from the 2008 financial collapse, two separate industries noticed the same thing—more people were driving again. Drunk driving fatalities climbed because there was simply more traffic, more late nights on the road, and (let's be honest) more of us. Meanwhile, EV charging stations proliferated because the same flush years that put more cars on highways also put more venture capital behind clean energy. It's rather like noticing that ice cream sales and drowning deaths move together—they're both just summer, patiently doing its work. By 2022, there were roughly 50,000 public charging stations scattered across America, a number that would have seemed impossible a decade earlier.

The correlation, in other words, is almost entirely about prosperity and motion—more people, more vehicles, more infrastructure of both the fatal and the futile kind. We are a species that sees patterns and then invents stories about what they mean, which is either our greatest gift or our most reliable way of confusing ourselves. The real correlation isn't between drunk driving and charging stations. It's between them and time.