Bicyclist traffic fatalities

As global instant ramen consumption has held relatively steady, American cyclist fatalities have risen, a correlation that connects noodle bowls in Tokyo to bike lanes in Portland with the casual disregard for geography that only a scatter plot can achieve. The coefficient is 0.862 across nine years, during which both metrics moved in vaguely similar patterns—mostly because anything that dipped in 2020 and recovered in 2021 correlates with everything else that did the same. The noodles simmer, the cyclist pedals, and the pandemic connects them by disrupting both.

Global ramen consumption fluctuated around 100 billion servings annually between 2014 and 2022, dipping slightly during the pandemic before recovering. Cycling fatalities followed a similar dip-and-recovery pattern, driven by the temporary reduction in traffic during lockdowns followed by the return of vehicles to roads. The correlation is largely a pandemic artifact: any two metrics that dropped in 2020 and rebounded in 2021 will produce a positive correlation over this nine-year window. Remove 2020–2021 and the relationship weakens considerably, because ramen consumption is driven by Asian market dynamics and cycling deaths are driven by American road design.

Nine years of ramen and cycling deaths is a correlation manufactured by the pandemic, which temporarily synchronized every human activity metric on the planet. The noodles were eaten, the bikes were ridden, and 2020 briefly made everything correlate with everything else. The pandemic was the confounding variable that confounded all confounding variables.