US mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people

American mobile-phone penetration and trips to the emergency room after a golf cart incident, climbing together for two decades. There are limits to how shocked you can be at this. Look up from the screen, hit the curb, take a bow.

US mobile subscriptions per hundred people went from roughly fifty in 2002 to over a hundred today, as smartphones became ubiquitous and many people carried two devices. Golf cart ER visits more than doubled in the same window for a different but adjacent reason: carts moved off the course and into retirement communities, master-planned developments, and college campuses, where they are driven by less-trained operators on less-controlled terrain. The lines climb together because the lifestyle they describe — sun-belt sprawl, walkable-but-not-really suburbs — grew on both phones and four wheels at once.

Two metrics of the same way of life. The phone in your hand and the cart under you, both moving slightly faster than is wise.