Bicyclist traffic fatalities

It turns out that as Americans have increasingly decided to launch rockets into space—a pursuit that requires billions of dollars, advanced degrees, and a certain philosophical comfort with explosive failure—they have simultaneously become better at riding bicycles in ways that keep them alive. This is the sort of correlation that makes you wonder whether the universe is playing a very long joke about human priorities, or whether we've simply become so skilled at progress that we manage it in all directions at once, including several we didn't intend. One suspects the cosmos finds this charming.

What's actually happening here is almost certainly economic vitality and regulatory attention moving in tandem across two entirely separate domains. The early 2000s saw both a genuine aerospace renaissance—the commercial space industry was still in its exuberant infancy, launching perhaps four or five times per year—and a parallel cultural shift toward cycling infrastructure in American cities, spurred by environmental consciousness and urban planning money. As GDP grew and cities invested in bike lanes and safety improvements, fatality rates dropped by roughly 40 percent over the two decades in question. Meanwhile, SpaceX and other commercial operators ramped launches from near-zero to over thirty annually by 2022. Both trends reflect the same underlying current: a country with money, ambition, and just enough regulatory infrastructure to prevent catastrophe in whichever direction it happens to be moving. It's less that rockets are killing cyclists and more that prosperity, when it arrives, tends to polish all the machinery.

So we are left with the mildly unsettling knowledge that bicyclist deaths and commercial space launches have moved in almost perfect synchronization for two decades, which tells us something true and something false simultaneously. It reminds us that correlation persists in the world whether or not we deserve to understand it. The universe remains unimpressed by our categories.