Bicyclist traffic fatalities

As US turkey production has declined, cycling fatalities have increased, a correlation that suggests either that turkeys were somehow keeping cyclists safe or that America is losing interest in one form of drumstick while gaining exposure to another kind of injury. The coefficient is -0.866 across twenty-one years, during which the nation produced fewer turkeys and more cycling accidents with the steady divergence of two trends moving in opposite directions for entirely unrelated reasons.

US turkey production declined modestly from about 5.9 billion pounds in 2002 to about 5.3 billion by 2022, as consumer preferences shifted toward chicken and plant-based proteins. Cycling fatalities grew from about 660 to over 1,000 during the same period. The negative correlation is a pure artifact of one metric slowly declining while the other slowly rises across the same two-decade window. Turkey is a food industry story driven by changing protein preferences; cycling deaths are a transportation story driven by inadequate infrastructure. They share a direction (opposite) and a calendar (2002–2022), but the connection ends there.

Twenty-one years of turkey declining and cycling deaths rising is a textbook case of two unrelated monotonic trends producing a meaningless correlation. The turkeys are fewer because Americans prefer chicken. The cyclists are more because cities encourage cycling without building for it. The Thanksgiving table and the bike lane have never met, and the chart connecting them knows this and does not care.