Global data created per year

It turns out that the more information humanity generates—petabytes upon petabytes of cat videos, sensor readings, and algorithmic predictions—the more bicyclists we seem to kill, and with a correlation so tight (0.941) that you'd think someone had deliberately wired these two phenomena together as a cosmic joke about our species' inability to manage simultaneous growth. The universe, it seems, has a sense of irony roughly equivalent to a teenager's.

What's likely happening here is that both metrics ride on the same economic wave: growth. As economies expanded from 2015 to 2022, data generation exploded—more businesses, more devices, more sensors everywhere—while simultaneously, urban cycling surged as cities invested in bike infrastructure and delivery apps made two-wheeled logistics essential. Both trends also correlate with something less cheerful: more people sharing increasingly congested streets. The data created per year scaled from roughly 10 zettabytes to 97 zettabytes (enough to fill 19 billion warehouse-sized hard drives), while cyclist fatalities climbed steadily alongside it, suggesting they're both symptoms of the same fever: rapid, unequally distributed urbanization.

The correlation is real, the causation is imaginary, and somewhere in between lies the actual story about how prosperity and danger sometimes grow in the same soil. We are pattern-recognition machines who occasionally mistake a shared parent for a direct relationship. One wonders what other seemingly unrelated things are quietly moving in step, waiting for someone bored enough to check.