Cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad

It turns out that as Americans have grown collectively wealthier—wealthy enough to pay 7.2 million dollars for thirty seconds of airtime to tell other Americans about trucks and beer—they have also, and with remarkable consistency, grown more likely to be struck by vehicles while crossing streets. This suggests either that prosperity is fundamentally incompatible with pedestrian survival, or that we are simply very good at noticing patterns in things that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

The boring answer, which is no fun at parties, involves population growth and urbanization. Between 2005 and 2022, America's population grew from 296 million to 338 million—that's roughly forty million new people, many of them moving into cities where both advertising budgets and foot traffic are dense. Economic cycles matter too: recessions soften ad spending while also correlating with reduced driving and fewer pedestrians out spending money, and booms do the opposite. There's also the infrastructure question—as cities became denser and richer, they built wider roads at higher speeds, which is rather like asking more people to cross streets that had become actively more hostile to the act of crossing them.

What we're witnessing here is not causation but two separate phenomena both riding the wave of American economic expansion and demographic change from 2005 to 2022. The universe contains infinite patterns if you squint hard enough and grab two datasets at random. Still, it's mildly unsettling to notice them moving together.