USPS package volume

It turns out that Americans' enthusiasm for having things delivered to their doors correlates almost perfectly with their enthusiasm for stepping in front of moving vehicles, which is either a devastating commentary on the human condition or simply evidence that we are all, fundamentally, terrible at noticing what's happening around us. The USPS, that ancient and patient institution, has spent the last eighteen years moving boxes while we've spent the same period being hit by cars at an almost eerily synchronized rate. One wonders if the parcels were worth it.

The actual culprit is almost certainly population growth and increased urbanization over this period—more people means more packages to deliver and more pedestrians dodging traffic, which is comforting in its ordinariness. Add to this the growth of e-commerce (Amazon didn't invent online shopping, but it certainly convinced America it was mandatory), which drove USPS volume up roughly forty percent between 2005 and 2022, while cities grew denser, streets grew busier, and we all became increasingly absorbed in our phones. A secondary player might be economic cycles: recessions dip both metrics slightly, recoveries lift them both, and neither the postal system nor distracted pedestrians cares much for nuance. The actual numbers are worth sitting with—we're talking about roughly 600 million packages a year moving alongside roughly 5,000 pedestrian deaths annually, two vast systems grinding along in perfect, meaningless synchronization.

What we've discovered is that correlation, that beautiful liar, has simply found two different consequences of the same underlying force: America getting bigger, busier, and more determined to receive things while walking. The datasets don't argue that packages kill people, but they do seem to suggest that the conditions that create one create the other, which is either reassuring or slightly more unsettling depending on your temperament. Mostly it just means we were looking for a pattern where two separate things happened to move together. The packages kept coming.