US life expectancy at birth

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us more than it apparently does, that Americans live longer in direct proportion to how many of them board trains in the Northeast Corridor. One might assume these were measuring entirely different aspects of human existence, like measuring happiness against the price of cheese, yet here they are, moving in near-perfect synchronisation from 2015 to 2022, as though longevity itself were somehow powered by regional rail service. The universe, one suspects, is having a quiet laugh.

Both numbers fell off a cliff in the same twelve months. Covid killed enough Americans to drag life expectancy down by roughly 1.8 years — the steepest drop since 1943 — while travel bans and work-from-home orders simultaneously emptied Amtrak's carriages. The correlation isn't between trains and longevity; it's between two different bills for the same pandemic.

So we are left with the peculiar comfort of knowing that US life expectancy and Amtrak ridership are, in fact, being hauled along by the same economic locomotive, which is reassuring in the way that understanding how a magic trick works is reassuring: the magic is gone, but at least you are no longer baffled. Neither metric caused the other, which may be the only honest thing we can say with certainty. Still, somewhere in America, someone is probably buying a train ticket to live longer.