Bicyclist traffic fatalities

As the United States has produced more broiler chickens, more cyclists have been killed, a correlation that spans twenty-one years and connects the poultry industry to the cycling community with the determined obliviousness of two trends that have never shared a lane. The coefficient is 0.851, and the chicken, as always, was going somewhere else entirely.

US broiler production grew from about 32 billion to over 45 billion pounds between 2002 and 2022, making chicken America's most consumed protein. Cycling fatalities grew from about 660 to over 1,000. Both are growth metrics in a growing economy: more chicken is produced because more people eat it, and more cyclists die because more people ride on roads that were not built for them. The shared variable is demographic growth and economic expansion—the same population that consumes more poultry also produces more urban cyclists, and both metrics scale accordingly.

Twenty-one years of chicken and cycling deaths is as straightforward as a correlation gets: two things growing in the same economy, at the same rate, for different reasons. The chicken is processed, the cyclist is endangered, and neither trend has any awareness of the other. The drumstick and the handlebars: both gripped, neither connected.