US traffic fatalities

It turns out that Americans have been solving traffic fatalities the way one might solve a broken clock: by installing something shiny nearby and hoping the correlation gods take notice. Between 2010 and 2022, as more people died on American roads, more electric vehicle charging stations sprouted up to serve the vehicles that weren't yet there. The universe, it seems, has a sense of timing but not necessarily of causation.

What's actually happening here is that both metrics are surfing the same economic wave. Those thirteen years saw genuine economic recovery after 2008, more cars on the road, more people driving more miles, and simultaneously, the infrastructure race for EVs accelerated as Tesla became less of a novelty and more of a cultural obsession. Consider that during this period, US vehicle miles traveled increased by roughly 16 percent—enough to add something like 20 billion miles of driving annually by 2022, which doesn't just increase fatalities, it increases demand for every kind of automotive infrastructure. The charging stations weren't preventing deaths; they were both products of the same era of automotive abundance and anxiety.

We are, collectively, a species that sees a dancing bear and immediately wonders if it's teaching us something about dance. The correlation between traffic deaths and EV chargers teaches us nothing about EVs preventing fatalities, but it teaches us something less comfortable: that two unrelated things can move in tandem simply because they're both passengers on the same historical moment. The data doesn't lie, but it certainly misleads.