Bicyclist traffic fatalities

It turns out that Americans have been installing electric vehicle charging stations at precisely the rate that other Americans have been dying on bicycles, a correlation so tight (0.958, if you must know) that one might reasonably suspect the stations are somehow causing the deaths, which would be quite the design flaw. The universe, it seems, is not content with mere chaos; it insists on synchronized chaos. What we have here is less a pattern and more a cosmic joke told in two unrelated languages that somehow rhyme.

The real culprit, almost certainly, is the thing lurking behind both datasets: the American economy humming along at different intensities over those thirteen years. EV charging infrastructure exploded because gas prices fluctuated, battery technology improved, and policy incentives bloomed like opportunistic fungi; meanwhile, bicyclist fatalities rose because more people were cycling (which is good), more cars were on roads (which is inevitable), and urban areas were densifying in ways that put cyclists and cars in closer proximity. Between 2010 and 2022, the US added roughly 44,000 public EV chargers while bicyclist deaths climbed from around 618 annually to 1,260—not because the chargers were cursed, but because both trends reflect the same underlying economic expansion and the growing pains of how we move around in an increasingly crowded country.

This is what happens when you measure two things over the same period in a country that is, broadly speaking, changing: they tend to move together, regardless of whether one has anything to do with the other. We are pattern-seeking creatures who live in a world drowning in data, and the correlation between bicyclist deaths and EV charging stations is just the universe reminding us not to get too comfortable. The numbers moved together. Nothing else did.