Pedestrian traffic fatalities

It appears that Americans have spent the last two decades in a curious bargain with the universe: for every turkey we've learned to produce more efficiently, we've collectively decided to spend slightly less time getting hit by cars. One might imagine the poultry industry and traffic safety engineers meeting in some cosmic boardroom, shaking hands on a deal that benefits precisely no one. The correlation is so tight it almost seems intentional, which is the sort of thing that should make us deeply uncomfortable about our ability to find patterns in absolutely anything.

The real culprit here is almost certainly economic cycles and infrastructure investment. As the US economy shifted between 2002 and 2022, turkey production fluctuated with consumer demand and farm consolidation, while simultaneously, cities invested in safety measures—better road design, enforced speed limits, pedestrian infrastructure—that genuinely reduced fatalities. Add to this the fact that turkey production became increasingly concentrated in fewer, larger facilities (meaning output could rise while the industry employed fewer people overall), while at the same time vehicles got safer, airbags became standard, and texting-while-driving laws finally arrived. By 2022, we were producing roughly 240 million turkeys annually while pedestrian deaths had fallen from around 4,900 to under 4,000. Two entirely separate human projects improving their efficiency in opposite directions, which is perfectly ordinary except when you plot them against each other.

This is what Spurious exists to remind us: that our pattern-seeking brains are magnificent at finding signal in noise, which is wonderful until it isn't. The turkeys and the pedestrians have almost nothing to do with one another, yet they dance together across twenty-one years of data like awkward partners at a wedding neither wanted to attend. Sometimes correlation really is just coincidence, waiting patiently to surprise us.