The 1975–1979 corpus splits into two irreconcilable visions of personal transportation in the near future, and standing in 2025, you can see exactly where each one went wrong — and for reasons their authors couldn't have anticipated.

Gerard O'Neill's The High Frontier imagines transportation freed entirely from the automobile's constraints: magnetically levitated trains in vacuum tunnels, "commuterspheres" requiring no engines, "travelspheres" accelerating to Concorde speeds on electricity alone. The vision is genuinely utopian in its specifics — no sonic booms, no petroleum, no complex crew, a fare perhaps one-fifth of a 1970s jetliner ticket. O'Neill gets the physics right and the politics completely wrong. He assumes the problem of transportation is engineering, and that once engineering solves it, adoption follows naturally. What he couldn't see from 1977 was that the automobile's dominance wasn't a technical problem awaiting a better solution — it was a political economy, a suburban land-use pattern, a century of infrastructure investment that would prove almost perfectly resistant to disruption. Maglev exists in 2025. It runs in Shanghai and a handful of Japanese corridors. It did not transform commuting.

Mark Adlard's Multiface sees something darker and more accurate. Its near-future London runs on electric autos hired by credit card from terminal dispensers — a system that looks, with some squinting, remarkably like 2025's EV rideshare ecosystem. But Adlard frames this not as liberation but as class stratification made literal: the gleaming silver auto "that looks like a spaceship on wheels" costs two months of a worker's increments for a one-way trip. The rectangular black box without doors costs almost nothing. The Autocomplex interchange map is so Byzantine that the protagonist can't decipher it. Transportation in Multiface is a legibility problem as much as a mobility problem — and the people who can't read the system are the people who can't afford the better vehicles. In 2025, this is precisely the texture of urban transportation: the Waymo operating in San Francisco's wealthier neighborhoods, the degraded bus network in the same city's poorer ones.

Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason delivers the sharpest retrospective sting. Writing in 1976, he identifies the automobile not as a transportation technology but as an addiction — a "cultivated and finally addictive hunger" that computers were deployed to serve rather than question. His counterfactual is pointed: computers could have been used to build mass transit and passenger rail; instead they were used to automate production lines so consumers could choose among "millions of trivial options on their new cars." In 2025, this reads as prophecy. The computing power that might have optimized rail networks was used to optimize route-to-market for SUV trim packages. And now the same pattern repeats: AI that might rationalize urban mobility is being deployed to perfect the individualized ride-hail experience.

Arthur C. Clarke's The View from Serendip takes the most interesting indirect approach. He largely dismisses the transportation problem by predicting that communications technology would make most commuting unnecessary — the city would "begin to die" as the comsole allowed executives to conduct ninety percent of their business from home. He was right about the technology (the comsole is the laptop with Teams), wrong about the consequence. Remote work happened, but cities didn't die; they gentrified. The commute Clarke thought would become obsolete is, in 2025, longer on average than it was in 1975, because the workers who can't work remotely — the care workers, the delivery drivers, the warehouse staff — were pushed further from city centers by the housing costs generated by the workers who can.

[O'Neill, The High Frontier, 1977] contributes the engineering imagination in its purest form. The "commutersphere," the magneplane, the travelsphere — these are worked out with genuine physical rigor. O'Neill's failure is not technical; it's sociological. He models transportation adoption on the logic of space habitat design, where the engineering constraints are primary. He cannot model the political economy of highway subsidies, auto industry lobbying, or suburban zoning. The passages on magneplane commuting are fascinating precisely because the technology did develop — and stalled at exactly the political junctures O'Neill's framework had no tools to analyze.

[Adlard, Multiface, 1975] does the heaviest lifting for the retrostition reading. The hiring terminal with its ranked vehicles, the credit card scanner, the alphanumeric gate — this is functionally a 1970s description of app-based mobility-as-a-service. More importantly, Adlard understands that access tiers are built into the system's design, not accidents of its implementation. The Autocomplex map that "frightened Will merely to look at it" is a precise image of what transportation scholars now call "legibility inequality" — the gap between those who can navigate complex systems and those who cannot. Adlard also gives us the gas-turbine auto running silently after 200,000 kilometers with no maintenance, a character luxuriating in "being part of a perfectly engineered machine" — and that character is an Executive. The perfectly engineered machine is not for everyone.

[Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976] provides the political-economic analysis the other texts lack. His identification of the automobile as a cultivated addiction — one that computing power was conscripted to serve — is the key to understanding why O'Neill's engineering solutions never arrived. Weizenbaum sees that the question "what should computers do?" was answered not by rational planning but by existing power structures. Transportation is his example, but the logic extends to every domain where technology was deployed to optimize the existing system rather than question it.

[Clarke, The View from Serendip, 1975–1977] contributes the communications-as-transportation-substitute thesis, which half-materialized. Clarke's prediction that improved communications would reduce commuting was correct for knowledge workers and wrong for everyone else — a class-differentiated outcome his universalist framing couldn't accommodate. His aside that "the road and rail systems will still be basically the same" in 1992, despite the incentives to change, shows a rare moment of infrastructural realism that contradicts his more utopian communications forecasts.

The arc across this corpus runs from engineering optimism (O'Neill) through systems critique (Weizenbaum) to dystopian texture (Adlard), with Clarke occupying an unstable middle position that bets on communications to dissolve the transportation problem entirely. What's striking from 2025 is that all three approaches partially materialized — and their partial materializations combined to produce an outcome none of them predicted.

O'Neill's electric, magnetically-guided vehicles exist; they're called Teslas and they navigate via buried sensor arrays and cameras rather than buried wires, but the principle is recognizable. Weizenbaum's warning about computing power serving automobile addiction rather than replacing it proved accurate for four decades — and is now being replicated with AI optimizing rideshare algorithms. Adlard's tiered, card-accessed electric vehicle system is Uber and Waymo and the municipal e-bike dock. Clarke's comsole eliminated some commuting for some people and intensified it for others. The pattern is: the technologies arrived roughly on schedule; the social arrangements that would have made them liberatory did not.

This corpus is almost entirely male, almost entirely Western, and almost entirely focused on commuting as a problem of middle-class knowledge workers. The transportation experiences of domestic workers, agricultural laborers, and people whose mobility is constrained not by technology but by cost, childcare, or disability are invisible here. O'Neill's space habitat commuter and Adlard's Executive Jan are both moving between places of their choosing; the question of people who must move — and cannot afford the silver vehicle — appears only in Adlard, and even there as backdrop rather than subject.

The corpus also cannot see the climate dimension of transportation, except obliquely in O'Neill's celebration of petroleum-free travel. None of these authors imagines that the automobile's environmental cost would become a political crisis in its own right, reframing the entire transportation question by the 2020s. They saw the resource scarcity problem (petroleum running out) but not the emissions problem (petroleum running freely and destroying the atmosphere). That blind spot shaped their predictions: O'Neill's travelsphere is exciting because it's cheap, not because it's zero-carbon; Weizenbaum objects to the automobile on grounds of misallocated computing power, not planetary heating. The lens through which 2025 actually evaluates transportation — carbon — is almost entirely absent from the vantage point of 1975–1979.