Restaurant spending per capita

We have discovered that Americans spend more money on restaurants at precisely the same rate that bicyclists fail to survive their commutes, which suggests either that fine dining is somehow summoning vengeful traffic spirits or that we are exceptionally skilled at noticing patterns in the foam on our cappuccinos. Over twenty-one years, these two wholly unrelated measures of human behaviour moved together like dance partners who have never met but somehow know all the steps. One involves pleasure. One involves bicycles. Draw your own conclusions about the universe's sense of irony.

The likeliest culprit is the steady creep of urbanisation and economic growth across the same period—more disposable income means both fancier restaurants and, more pressingly, more people attempting to cycle through increasingly congested cities where cars have developed opinions about bicyclists. The 2002-2022 window captures a particularly savage expansion of car traffic alongside restaurant culture; cities got richer and messier simultaneously, like someone who has inherited money and forgotten how to parallel park. Between 2008 and 2012 alone, the number of restaurant locations in the United States grew by roughly 7 percent while cycling became fashionable enough that people actually died doing it more frequently—a tragic and perfectly inverse relationship between our appetite for spending and our appetite for risk.

What we have really discovered is that correlation data is a kind of statistical ink blot test, revealing far more about our compulsion to connect dots than about any meaningful relationship between fettuccine and fatalities. The restaurant spending and bicycle death datasets move together for the prosaic reason that they are both symptoms of the same underlying social currents: density, wealth, urban change. We chose to measure two of them and were startled by the result, which says something quietly unflattering about how we look at the world.