Pedestrian traffic fatalities

It is a curious fact, and one that has probably not gone unnoticed by the sort of people who notice such things, that as Americans have gradually installed more machines to charge their electric vehicles, other Americans have been walking into traffic with increasing regularity. One might almost think the universe had decided to hedge its bets on the whole sustainability question. The data does not care what you think about this.

The explanation, it turns out, is refreshingly mundane: both metrics are simply following the same underlying current of American life from 2010 to 2022, which is that more people were driving, living in places with more traffic, and yes, also occasionally getting hit by cars while doing the ordinary business of crossing streets. Population grew by about twelve percent in those years, and sprawl continued its patient colonization of the landscape, which means more vehicles on the road, more charging stations to service those vehicles, and more opportunity for the basic geometry of a two-ton object and a human body to work itself out in tragic terms. It is rather like noticing that both ice cream sales and drowning deaths correlate perfectly across a summer, then wondering if perhaps one was causing the other.

What this teaches us, if we are paying attention, is that almost any two things trending upward in a period of general growth will eventually look like they are dancing together, even when one is about infrastructure and the other is about people failing to use a crosswalk. The correlation is almost eerily perfect at 0.961, which should probably make us more suspicious rather than less. We built charging stations while people died in traffic, and the numbers held hands the whole time.