Per capita bottled water consumption

It is an unpleasant graph but a real one: as Americans drank more bottled water, more pedestrians were killed by cars, and between 2014 and 2022 the two curves have risen with a grim synchrony (r = 0.959) that neither public health officials nor traffic engineers particularly want to talk about. The hydration goes up; the cross-walk loses. The bottle is empty by the time the siren arrives.

US per capita bottled water consumption climbed from about 34 gallons per person in 2014 to over 47 gallons by 2022, overtaking soda permanently; pedestrian traffic fatalities, meanwhile, rose from about 4,900 in 2014 to over 7,500 by 2022, reversing decades of safety gains in what transportation researchers have labeled an American exception (most peer countries saw pedestrian deaths continue to fall). The shared villain is almost certainly the American vehicle fleet: bigger, heavier, with taller hoods that obscure pedestrians and crumple zones that protect the driver at the expense of whoever they hit. Bottled water and pedestrian deaths are not connected by biology; they are both connected to the same sprawling, motorized, perpetually-thirsty landscape.

The bottle drains. The crosswalk claims its toll. Walking has become, statistically, a category of minor extreme sport.