People who own a standalone GPS

Between 2008 and 2022, the world built a very long train network in China and quietly threw away its dedicated GPS units in favor of smartphones, and the two curves produced an almost perfect inverse (r = -0.959). China laid rails; drivers abandoned Garmins. One infrastructure got longer; one device got smaller, and then smaller, and then invisible inside a phone.

China's high-speed rail network grew from zero in 2008 to over 42,000 km by 2022, a scale greater than the rest of the world combined, with the Beijing-Shanghai line alone carrying over 330 million passengers annually. Standalone GPS ownership peaked around 2009 at over 65% of US adults and collapsed to under 10% by 2022 as smartphones absorbed the function, which was itself the single fastest technology substitution of the 2010s. The two trends share nothing causally but everything temporally — both are stories of the exact same 15-year window in which one infrastructure was built on the ground and another infrastructure moved into pockets, and both rewrote how people find their way.

The rail extends; the Garmin vanishes. Both are ways of arriving somewhere without asking a stranger.