The 1975–1979 corpus splits cleanly into two incompatible visions of personal transportation in 2025, and the split tells you everything about where each author's imagination was anchored.

Gerard O'Neill in The High Frontier (1977) builds an entire transportation theology around the abolition of scarcity — not technological scarcity but energy scarcity. His "commutersphere" and "travelsphere" work because space offers something Earth can't: a frictionless vacuum where a vehicle needs no engine, no fuel, no crew. The travelsphere accelerates once and coasts. The inter-habitat vehicle between twin cylinders requires no energy at all — it simply unlocks from one rotating surface and locks onto the other, physics doing all the work. O'Neill is so delighted by this that he says it "sounds vaguely disquieting, rather too much like perpetual motion." The transportation vision is post-petroleum, post-infrastructure, post-congestion. A couple takes a "travelsphere" to dinner in another habitat the way we'd take a cab across town. Young people "jet-set" between habitats on the equivalent of a bus token.

Joseph Weizenbaum in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) looks at the same historical moment and sees something opposite: the computer didn't liberate personal transportation, it entrenched it. His bitter observation — that computers were used to automate automobile production lines so people could choose from "millions of trivial options on their new cars" rather than being used to develop mass transit — reads in 2025 as one of the most accurate predictions in the corpus. We got configurators, not trains. The "addictive hunger for private automobiles" he describes wasn't satisfied; it was digitized, optimized, and exported globally.

Mark Adlard's Multiface (set in a future Britain that feels like 2025 in its social stratification) lands somewhere between these poles. His electric autos — silent, battery-recharged at "Autoterminuses," hired by credit card from ticket dispensers — are genuinely prescient. The rental model, the tiered access by cost, the intimidating road interchange that Will can't parse from a map: this is closer to navigating a ride-share app in an unfamiliar city than anything O'Neill imagined. But Adlard also keeps the car as a class marker. The cheapest auto is a "rectangular black box with a wheel at each corner." The most expensive looks "like a spaceship on wheels" and costs two months of increments for a one-way trip. Electric vehicles arrived. The hierarchy didn't go anywhere.

Arthur C. Clarke in The View from Serendip (1977) makes his most interesting transportation move sideways — he predicts that communication would replace commuting. "Men do much less commuting, much more communicating." The home console would make ninety percent of executive business performable without leaving home. The city, he argues, would "begin to die." In 2025, this reads as half-right in a way Clarke didn't quite intend: remote work did reduce commuting for knowledge workers after 2020, but cities didn't die — they got more expensive, and the people who couldn't work remotely still commute, often longer distances than before.

[O'Neill, The High Frontier, 1977] carries the utopian load. His three transport systems — the bicycle/electric runabout for local movement, the maglev "magneplane" for intra-habitat transit, and the travelsphere for inter-habitat travel — form a complete hierarchy that mirrors how urban planners actually think about transportation networks. What's remarkable is that maglev technology exists in 2025 and operates commercially (Japan's SCMaglev, China's Shanghai line), but in the niche O'Neill imagined for jets, not as a replacement for bicycles. His vision was right about the technology, wrong about the context — maglev works on Earth, but not because we built space habitats first.

[Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976] delivers the sharpest retrospective sting. His argument isn't that cars are bad — it's that computers were deployed to deepen car dependency rather than offer an alternative. Look at 2025: navigation apps optimized car routing, autonomous vehicle development absorbed billions that might have funded rail, and the "astronomical number of basically identical models" he mocked has been succeeded by an astronomical number of basically identical EV crossovers with different badge logos. The form of his critique landed; the specific technology of the critique (production line automation) gave way to software, but the dynamic is identical.

[Adlard, Multiface, 1975] is the most textually specific about the experience of near-future personal transport. The scene of Will and Isabel at the ticket dispenser, choosing between vehicles by cost tier, inserting a credit card, following an alphanumeric scanner to the departure bay — this reads like a description of renting a Zipcar or summoning a Waymo. The "electric autos" that "don't make any noise or fumes" are real. The class stratification of access to them is also real: in 2025, the cheapest EVs are still beyond many household budgets, and the premium end looks, in fact, like spaceships on wheels (see: Cybertruck, Lucid Air). Adlard also gives us the autonomous-adjacent vehicle in passage 9 — Jan's auto navigating the autoway, the control panel prompting him to punch in new coordinates, the vehicle warning him with color-coded lights before he takes over manually. This is Level 2-3 autonomy, described accurately forty-five years early.

[Clarke, The View from Serendip, 1977] contributes the substitution thesis — that electronic communication would hollow out the need for physical transportation. His 1992 prediction of home communications consoles doing "ninety percent of executive business" came true on a twenty-year delay. But his corollary — that this would kill the city and thus kill commuting — missed the actual dynamic: remote work reduced commuting for some while simultaneously enabling others to move farther from urban cores, increasing car dependency in exurban and rural areas. The city didn't die; it bifurcated.

The arc across this five-year window runs from systemic reimagination to incremental critique. O'Neill, writing from inside the space colony movement, imagines transportation as something you rebuild from scratch in a new environment — and in doing so, gets the physics right (maglev, electric vehicles, computer-controlled routing) while getting the context entirely wrong (no space habitats). Weizenbaum, writing from inside computer science, imagines transportation as something you could have changed but chose not to — and in doing so, gets the politics exactly right while underestimating how thoroughly digitization would intensify rather than redirect automobile culture.

What both miss, and what Adlard partially catches, is the service layer — the idea that the vehicle itself would become secondary to the platform that dispatches it. O'Neill's travelsphere is a vehicle; nobody imagined Uber. Weizenbaum's critique targets production; nobody imagined that the computer would eventually sit inside the car and still not fix the commute. By 2025, personal transportation has been thoroughly digitized at every layer — routing, payment, vehicle management, autonomous operation — and yet the basic geometry of American daily life (house, car, highway, office park) has barely shifted from 1977.

This corpus is almost entirely male, white, and Anglo-American, writing about transportation as a problem of engineering or systems design. Nobody in these passages asks who gets left out when transportation is tiered by credit, or what happens to the person who can't afford even the cheapest auto in Adlard's Tcity, or what maglev in a space habitat means for the worker who maintains the maglev. Weizenbaum gestures at welfare recipients being monitored, but doesn't connect that to mobility justice.

The corpus also has no Global South perspective — Clarke writes from Sri Lanka but thinks in British and American infrastructure terms. The actual 2025 story of personal transportation includes the explosion of motorcycle taxis, e-rickshaws, and informal transit networks across Asia and Africa that are more transformative in aggregate than autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. That story is entirely outside this telescope's frame.

Finally: nobody in 1975–1979 imagined that the data generated by personal transportation would become more economically valuable than the transportation itself. The car as surveillance infrastructure, the ride-share platform as a data harvesting operation — this is the dimension that would have required a different kind of imagination entirely, one that wasn't available in this corpus until Weizenbaum's critique got pointed directly at mobility, which it never quite did.