As America has gotten wealthier per capita, more of its pedestrians have been killed, a correlation that suggests prosperity is literally dangerous to walk near. The coefficient is 0.883 across twenty-one years, during which the nation got richer and its streets got deadlier with the synchronized precision of an economy that values growth over all other metrics, including survival. The GDP goes up, the pedestrians go down, and the chart does not distinguish between the two kinds of going down.
US GDP per capita grew from about $38,000 in 2002 to over $76,000 by 2022, roughly doubling in nominal terms. Pedestrian fatalities grew from about 4,800 to over 7,500. The connection is not as abstract as it appears: wealthier Americans buy larger vehicles (SUVs and trucks now account for over 70 percent of new car sales, up from about 50 percent in 2002), drive more miles (vehicle-miles traveled tracks GDP closely), and increasingly live in sprawling suburban environments where wide, fast roads intersect with pedestrian crossings. The same economic growth that inflates GDP also inflates vehicle size, road speed, and urban sprawl—all of which are direct contributors to pedestrian fatalities.
Twenty-one years of GDP and pedestrian deaths growing together is one of the less spurious correlations on this site, because the mechanism—wealth produces bigger, faster vehicles on wider roads—is real. The economy grows, the cars grow, and the pedestrians pay the difference. Prosperity, it turns out, has a body count that shows up in crosswalks rather than quarterly reports.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “US GDP per capita” vs “Pedestrian traffic fatalities” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
