Amtrak ridership

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us more than it does, that Americans who ride trains between cities move in almost perfect synchronisation with Americans who borrow books from publicly funded buildings. One might as reasonably expect left-handed plumbers to correlate with the price of tea in Shanghai. And yet here we are, watching Amtrak passengers and library visitors waltz together through eight years of data as though they were part of some vast, coordinated scheme. The universe, it seems, enjoys a joke we don't quite get.

Both are buildings you sit quietly inside, and in 2020 both were among the first to close. Amtrak ridership fell by roughly two thirds as travel bans took hold, while library visits dropped even further after buildings shuttered for months and returned only for curbside pickup. The correlation measures nothing more profound than the shared misfortune of public spaces during a respiratory pandemic.

We are pattern-seeking creatures who live in a universe that occasionally indulges us, offering up correlations so perfect they feel like evidence of something when they are probably just evidence that two things got pulled by the same invisible rope. Neither Amtrak nor the library system is driving the other; they are both passengers in a car we don't quite have the map to. What this tells us about American life between 2015 and 2022 remains pleasantly unclear.