Bicyclist traffic fatalities

It is a curious fact, and one which the universe seems to have noticed before we did, that as Chinese inventors have been filing patents at an accelerating rate between 2010 and 2021, American cyclists have been dying on roads at precisely the same rhythm, as though someone in Beijing's patent office were pulling an invisible thread attached to a Stop sign in Denver. One might reasonably expect these two phenomena to have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, which is exactly what makes them move together with a correlation of 0.918, which is to say almost perfectly, which is to say the kind of lockstep that makes you wonder whether the universe is playing a joke or simply very tired.

What's actually happening here is almost certainly that both variables are hitching a ride on the same economic expansion—China's rapid industrialization and urbanization between 2010 and 2021 turbocharged patent applications (going from about 1 million to 3.2 million annually), while the same period saw Americans cycling more, commuting longer, and generally putting themselves in more situations where they could collide with cars, delivery trucks, and the occasional distracted driver. The correlation might also be rubbing shoulders with a seasonal effect, where winter months see fewer cyclists but fewer patent applications too, or even something as simple as both variables being dragged upward by technological change and GDP growth across different continents—the world got richer and busier in ways that made both more likely. Think of it this way: if you stretched China's economic growth into a physical object, it would be tall enough to see into next week, and it turns out that same growth somehow lengthened every bike commute in America.

This is what happens when you have twelve data points and a universe that is fundamentally, almost defiantly, connected in ways no one asked it to be. We tend to imagine that the world breaks neatly into categories—death statistics here, innovation metrics there—but the world apparently did not get the memo. Perhaps the real correlation is just this: everything grows together, and some things die together, and we spend our time noticing the patterns we were always going to notice anyway.