The 1975–1979 corpus, looking toward 1985, reveals something sharper than prediction: a diagnosis of the automobile as a computational trap. Weizenbaum delivers the most precise articulation — computers were deployed not to reimagine personal transportation but to perfect its illusion of choice. "People could choose from among millions of trivial options on their new cars" while the car itself remained fundamentally unchanged, its dominance over urban space unquestioned. The private automobile, in Weizenbaum's framing, was already an addiction before the microchip arrived to service it. What computers enabled wasn't liberation from car culture but its deeper entrenchment — infinite customization in the service of zero structural change. [Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976]

Against this critique, the corpus splits into two imaginative directions. Adlard's Multiface constructs a near-future London where the automobile has been rationalized into something almost unrecognizable: silent electric vehicles hired by credit card from automated terminals, tiered by cost across social class, navigated through labyrinthine autocomplexes that terrify the uninitiated. Will's encounter with the "rectangular black box with a wheel at each corner" — the cheapest available option, doorless, minimal — reads as the logical endpoint of Weizenbaum's critique inverted: the car stripped of all those trivial options, reduced to pure transit function, but in a society still organized entirely around personal vehicular movement. The technology changed; the dependency didn't. [Adlard, Multiface, 1976]

Spinrad's A World Between imagines the furthest departure: a culture where personal transport has fractured into an ecology of small, playful, body-integrated machines — powerskates, skimboards, jump-harnesses, one-place floaters. Carlotta's floater is a metal disc, a handlebar, a twist-throttle. "Getting there is all the fun" is the unspoken motto, and the transport system embodies it physically: the city is legible, the vehicles are human-scaled, and the infrastructure is shared. This is the road not taken from the 1970s moment — the mass-transit alternative Weizenbaum mourned as foreclosed. Spinrad imagined it flourishing, but significantly, he displaced it to an off-world colony. Earth, implicitly, couldn't get there. [Spinrad, A World Between, 1979]

King's The Stand completes the picture from the other direction entirely. When civilization collapses, the car becomes a ghost — roads full of abandoned vehicles, the Harley both freedom and death-threat, hitchhiking remembered as a lost sacrament. "The car was a form of teleportation. The car defeated the map." King's elegiac language for automobile culture reveals what the other authors only imply: the car isn't just transportation infrastructure, it's the medium through which Americans experienced space and freedom. Its absence doesn't liberate — it amputates. [King, The Stand, 1978]

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[Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976] — The analytical spine of the entire configuration. Weizenbaum makes the structural argument that no other text in the corpus makes explicitly: the computer was used to preserve the automobile's dominance rather than enable alternatives. Mass transit and passenger rail were the foreclosed paths. This isn't speculation about 1985 — it's a diagnosis of the 1950s–70s decision-making that would lock in the automotive future. His automobile passage sits inside a broader argument about technological lock-in and addictive systems, making the car a case study in how "inability to act" gets resolved by deepening the problem rather than rethinking it.

[Adlard, Multiface, 1976] — The most sustained fictional treatment of near-future personal transport in the corpus. Adlard does something unusual: he imagines the car reformed rather than replaced or collapsed. Electric motors, automated terminals, credit-card hiring, tiered pricing by social class. The autocomplex map that "frightened Will merely to look at it" is a perfect image of infrastructure complexity overwhelming the individual. Adlard got electric vehicles right, got the credit-card transaction right, got the class stratification of mobility right. What he missed: the smartness of the vehicle itself. His autos are dumb boxes navigated by human skill through bewildering infrastructure. The actual 2020s answer was the opposite — intelligent vehicles, simplified interfaces, infrastructure complexity hidden inside the machine.

[Spinrad, A World Between, 1979] — Contributes the utopian counter-image, and crucially locates it off-Earth. The ecology of small personal transport devices in Gotham is the most genuinely speculative vision in the corpus — not a reformed automobile but a replacement of the automobile's logic entirely. Powerskates, floaters, skimboards: these are personal transport as kinesthetic pleasure, not just locomotion. The detail that Carlotta "had taken her life in her hands on powerskates and skimboards" before graduating to the safer floater traces an individual life-history through transport modes — exactly how people actually relate to personal mobility.

[King, The Stand, 1978] — Provides the mythological dimension. King isn't analyzing transport; he's recording its emotional weight. The Harley that grins "like a sideshow barker," the Chevys and Pontiacs of hitchhiking memory, the bicycle as humiliating regression — these images map the American psychic investment in motorized personal transport. The Stand's post-collapse world reveals what the analytical texts can only gesture at: the car isn't infrastructure, it's identity and freedom, and its loss is experienced as civilizational bereavement.

[Dick, A Scanner Darkly, 1977] — A minor but telling contribution. The car in Dick's near-future Orange County is continuous with its 1970s present: a junker with shot oil rings, a place to watch girls from, a radio that gets stolen. Undercover cops drive modified Chevys. The only futuristic element is the surveillance infrastructure inside the car radio. Dick's 1985 has no new transportation technology — just the existing system weaponized for monitoring. This is the hyperstition that landed most accurately.

[O'Neill, The High Frontier, 1977] — The technical optimist's vision. O'Neill's space habitats feature maglev commuter systems, electric runabouts, and "travelspheres" — transportation designed from scratch for a new environment. The detail about electric vehicles following "the magnetic lure of a buried wire" home from the maglev station is charming and prescient (autonomous vehicle guidance). O'Neill's transport imagination is genuinely different from Earth-bound authors: freed from automotive path-dependency, he designs for human comfort first. The "commutersphere" offering dinner in another habitat for less than a car trip's cost is the vision Weizenbaum said computers could have enabled.

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The arc across this corpus runs from diagnosis to divergence. Weizenbaum, writing as analyst, identifies the fork already taken — computers deepened automobile dependency rather than enabling alternatives. The fiction writers then split along a fault line of location: Earth-set narratives (Adlard, Dick, King) show transport futures that are reforms or failures of the existing automotive system, while off-world or explicitly utopian settings (Spinrad, O'Neill) are where genuinely different transportation ecologies become imaginable. This isn't accidental. The 1975–79 moment is post-oil-crisis, post-urban-freeway-revolt, the moment when American car culture first seemed genuinely vulnerable — and yet these authors could only imagine the alternative elsewhere. Earth, in this corpus, is already locked.

The inflection point is the electric vehicle. Both Adlard and O'Neill reach for electric propulsion as the obvious reform — quiet, clean, rechargeable at terminals. They got the technology directionally right but missed the integration: neither imagined the smartphone-coordinated, GPS-navigated, algorithmically dispatched electric vehicle. They imagined reformed hardware; what arrived was reformed software running on familiar hardware. Weizenbaum would recognize this immediately: computers were used, again, to optimize the existing system rather than replace it.

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This corpus is almost entirely white, male, and Anglophone — and it shows in the transport imagination. The car as specifically American mythology (King's Chevys and Pontiacs, Dick's Orange County freeway culture) dominates, while non-automotive transport cultures — the bicycle infrastructure of the Netherlands, the rail systems of Japan, the motorcycle economies of Southeast Asia — are invisible. When Weizenbaum mourns the foreclosure of mass transit, he's mourning a specifically American political failure; the rest of the world hadn't yet made that choice definitively.

The corpus also has no working-class or Global South voices imagining transport futures. Adlard's Will is a lower-class character navigating an unequal transport system, but Adlard is writing about that inequality, not from it. The people who actually depend on buses, who walk, who cannot afford even the cheapest "rectangular black box" — they don't appear as imaginative agents in this slice of speculative fiction. Spinrad's Gotham is explicitly post-scarcity; King's apocalypse briefly equalizes everyone on foot; but neither imagines the ongoing present-tense experience of transport poverty.

Finally: no one in this corpus imagined the phone as a transportation technology. Clarke comes closest, envisioning the home communications console replacing commuting — but the device that would actually reorganize urban mobility was the networked computer in everyone's pocket, dispatching shared vehicles, replacing ownership with access. That synthesis — Weizenbaum's computer, Spinrad's small personal vehicles, Dick's surveillance infrastructure — arrived as Uber, and none of them saw it whole.