Bicyclist traffic fatalities

It appears that as Indian software engineers have gotten better at exporting services to the world, bicyclists in various countries have gotten proportionally worse at surviving their commutes, which is either a damning indictment of global traffic infrastructure or a reminder that the universe enjoys a joke at humanity's expense. The correlation sits at 0.907, which is to say these two entirely unrelated things—one involving rupees and server farms, the other involving blood and pavement—have moved together like dance partners who've never met but somehow memorised the same waltz.

What's probably happening is that both trends ride the same economic wave: as India's IT boom accelerated from 2015 onwards, so did motorisation and urbanisation across the developing world, which meant more cars, more congestion, more distracted drivers, and therefore more bicyclists finding themselves in traffic systems never designed to accommodate them. Population growth in cities with poor cycling infrastructure could easily explain both the rise in exports (more people in booming tech hubs) and the rise in cyclist fatalities (those same cities becoming traffic nightmares). It's the kind of correlation that feels like magic until you remember that globalisation and urbanisation are just lifting entire populations onto the same conveyor belt, and what moves one metric often nudges its neighbours along for the ride.

We are pattern-recognition machines riding on a planet of genuine complexity, which means that sometimes a bicycle death and a software export share nothing but a decade and our desperate need to believe everything is connected. The real story isn't that India's IT success kills cyclists; it's that we're all caught in the same tide of economic and demographic change, and the data just happens to slosh in rhythm. We should probably stop looking for meaning in coincidence, and yet, here we are, still looking.