Amtrak ridership

It is a curious fact, and one that says something rather damning about a species that has mastered flight, that the number of people choosing to sit in uncomfortable seats for fourteen hours between Boston and Miami should move in almost perfect synchrony with the number of humans employed to organize books alphabetically. One might have expected these two populations to drift apart like continental plates, pursuing entirely separate destinies across the years 2015 to 2022, but instead they executed what can only be described as a coordinated dance, neither one willing to move without the other. It turns out that Amtrak passengers and American librarians are, statistically speaking, a couple.

Trains and librarians don't share a supply chain, but they share a 2020. Amtrak ridership collapsed under travel bans while library systems, facing shuttered buildings and budgets redirected to emergency spending, quietly trimmed staff. The correlation isn't structural; it's the same fiscal shockwave hitting two public assets in the same quarter.

We are pattern-seeking creatures living in a universe of infinite coincidences, and sometimes two completely unrelated statistics will hold hands for eight years for no reason other than that they were both responding to the same economic tailwind. The correlation is real, the causation is almost certainly imaginary, and both of these facts can be true at once. We are delightfully, helplessly confused.