Pedestrian traffic fatalities

It is a curious feature of our species that we have managed to arrange matters so that the fewer whales swim in the Atlantic, the fewer of us get hit by cars, as though the universe were operating some vast, vindictive ledger in which marine mammals serve as collateral. One might suppose the whales had negotiated this directly with the Department of Transportation, which would at least explain why both figures move with such metronomic precision from 2002 to 2022. They did not.

What we're likely witnessing is the slow upward creep of economic prosperity and urban design in wealthy nations—the very conditions that simultaneously saved whales (stricter fishing regulations, international agreements, fewer ships hitting them) and saved pedestrians (better traffic infrastructure, more pedestrian zones, cameras that actually work). Between 2002 and 2022, the right whale population dropped from around 350 to 340 individuals, a decline you could fit inside a small apartment building, while pedestrian deaths in the United States fell from nearly 5,000 to under 4,700. Both trends reflect, in their separate ways, a planet learning to be slightly more careful about the living things on it.

The real story here is not that whales and pedestrians are mysteriously linked by some cosmic principle, but rather that when we decide to measure something, we begin to care for it, and when we care for it, the numbers tend to move in the direction we intended. Whether this pattern holds up next decade is another matter entirely. The whales, presumably, are not waiting to find out.