Two correlated data sets don’t prove that one caused the other, but James O’Malley, the writer who compiled the data, drew on his own international travels, musing on theories that might bind the two data sets together more convincingly.
“Traffic cops are very visible in [downtown] Bucharest, but it appears that few motorists worry about them: rule breaking is so endemic, they are clearly unable to fully enforce the law,” he wrote. “ … The aggressive driving might also suggest that motorists have little faith that others are likely to respect the supposed rules. … If I’m right, and this [correlation] isn’t a coincidence, then it suggests that the state of a country’s roads could also act as a neat heuristic for understanding the quality of a country’s government.”
