Choking deaths on food in the US

As New Yorkers cycled more miles on Citi Bikes between 2013 and 2021, Americans across the country choked on food at a proportionally increasing rate, which strongly implies that bicycle riding causes distant citizens to eat dangerously. The mechanism is unclear but the correlation of 0.97 demands an explanation, and the best available is that both things were simply going up. Possibly the vibrations from all that cycling travel through the earth's crust and dislodge food from American throats nationwide. Citi Bike has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Citi Bike trips grew from about 6 million in 2013 to over 20 million annually by the early 2020s as the system expanded and cycling normalized in NYC. Choking deaths from food in the US are driven primarily by an aging population — adults over 65 account for the majority of such fatalities — and the senior population grew substantially during this period as Baby Boomers entered their late sixties. Both trends are fundamentally demographic: urban cycling adoption reflects younger professional influxes to cities, while food choking deaths reflect the aging of the broader US population, and both happened to accelerate across the same nine-year window.

New York and the rest of America are sometimes living in entirely different statistical universes that happen to share a timeline. That their numbers rhyme is a coincidence; that we notice is human nature.