Amtrak ridership

Trains emptied on the ground while junk multiplied in orbit, which is the kind of symmetry that rewards gazing up and down at the same time. Humans went one way, satellites the other. Neither was where we thought it would be.

Amtrak ridership collapsed in 2020 under travel bans and work-from-home orders, while tracked orbital debris continued its long accumulation as satellite constellations expanded and older missions fragmented. Two trends with entirely separate mechanisms that both had notable 2020 bends — one catastrophic, one steady — in the same window.

So the correlation is a strange parallel: one mode of transport grounded, another cluttering overhead. Neither is talking to the other. Both are harder to clean up.