The corpus from 1975–1979 reveals a striking split personality when imagining personal transportation in our era. On one side, Gerard O'Neill's The High Frontier builds an elaborate, optimistic engineering fantasy — maglev commuter systems, engineless "travelspheres" coasting between space habitats on pure physics, electric runabouts following buried magnetic wires home at walking speed. On the other, Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason looks at the same automobile-saturated landscape of the 1970s and names it as a failure of imagination already locked in: the computer didn't liberate transportation, it deepened the addiction, automating production lines so consumers could choose "from among millions of trivial options on their new cars." Mark Adlard's Multiface splits the difference — electric autos exist in Tcity, silent and fumeless, but they're stratified by cost, navigated through incomprehensible ring-road schematics, and operated by people who have to study a booklet just to find the green starter button.

What the era couldn't see clearly was the inertia of the existing system. Arthur Clarke comes closest to naming it in The View from Serendip: "The road and rail systems will still be basically the same," he writes, acknowledging that capital investment in infrastructure moves on geological time. But even Clarke assumes this inertia is a temporary drag on an inevitable transformation — that the city would begin to die as communications replaced commuting, that reduced travel demand would follow naturally from the communications revolution. What actually happened is that the communications revolution and the automobile addiction grew together, mutually reinforcing. Ride-hailing apps didn't replace cars; they multiplied vehicle-miles traveled. Remote work didn't empty highways; it redistributed congestion to suburbs.

O'Neill's commutersphere is the most revealing miss. His space-habitat transportation is genuinely elegant — no engines, no fuel, no sonic booms, costs "about a fifth" of jet travel per passenger-mile — but it requires starting from scratch, building civilization in a vacuum where the old infrastructure doesn't exist yet. That's the tell. The 1970s authors who imagined transportation transformation most vividly did so by relocating the problem to space, where the legacy system couldn't follow. Adlard's electric autos in Multiface, set in a future Britain, are the more honest prediction: the vehicles changed, but the roads, the class stratification of vehicle choice, the bewildering interchange geometry — all of that persisted.

The Weizenbaum passage is the sharpest instrument here. Writing in 1976, he frames the private automobile not as a technology but as a "cultivated and finally addictive hunger" — and notes that the computer, which might have enabled a pivot to mass transit, was instead used to manufacture the illusion of choice within the addiction. In 2025, with Tesla offering software-locked features and car manufacturers selling subscription access to heated seats, his diagnosis reads less like prediction than autopsy.

[O'Neill, The High Frontier, 1976] contributes the era's most technically detailed vision of transformed personal transportation — maglev in vacuum tubes, autonomous electric runabouts, the physics-powered travelsphere. What makes it useful for Retrostition isn't its accuracy but its conditions: every innovation requires escaping Earth's infrastructure. The magneplane works "because high-vacuum is an ideal dragless, noiseless medium." The travelsphere costs nothing because there's no atmosphere to fight. O'Neill's transportation utopia is predicated on a blank slate that Earth never offered.

[Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976] provides the ideological counter-signal. His argument — that computers were used to entrench automobile dependency rather than transcend it — is the most accurate single observation in the corpus about what actually happened. He saw, in 1976, that the technology capable of enabling alternatives was instead being deployed to optimize the existing system. The phrase "addictive hunger for private automobiles" is doing real analytical work, not rhetorical flourish.

[Adlard, Multiface, 1975] offers the most grounded future-present transportation scene: electric autos, tiered by cost, navigated through bureaucratic complexity, operated without noise or fumes but still embedded in class hierarchy and infrastructural confusion. The detail of Will studying How To Drive An Auto for two months, then confronting a ring-road map "so difficult as to be unintelligible," captures something the optimists missed — that even radically changed vehicles don't simplify the systems they move through.

[Clarke, The View from Serendip, 1977] contributes two things: the clearest acknowledgment of infrastructure inertia ("The road and rail systems will still be basically the same"), and the prediction that reduced commuting would follow from communications technology. The first is right. The second is the era's most durable wrong turn — the assumption that substitution would occur rather than accumulation.

The arc across this five-year window moves from critique to fantasy to resigned incrementalism. Weizenbaum (1976) diagnoses the present as already captured. O'Neill (1976) escapes the problem by relocating it to orbit. Adlard (1975) imagines reform within the existing urban structure — electrification, terminal systems, credit-card access — but shows it reproducing the old hierarchies. Clarke (1977) predicts the communications substitute for travel while simultaneously acknowledging the physical system won't change fast enough to matter within the forecast window.

The inflection point is the petroleum crisis, present in all these texts as ambient pressure. O'Neill's travelsphere explicitly celebrates "no burnup of scarce petroleum resources." Clarke's inertia argument names gas stations as the last holdouts of a dying system. Weizenbaum's critique of the automobile is inseparable from his critique of computing as a tool of entrenchment. But by 1979 the crisis had already begun to recede from urgency — and with it, the imaginative pressure to break the system rather than reform it. The corpus captures the last moment when radical transportation alternatives felt politically plausible, just before the 1980s locked in another forty years of the same.

This slice of the corpus is almost entirely male, almost entirely Anglo-American or Anglo-British, and almost entirely focused on the experience of the mobile, employed, technically literate commuter. The electric autos in Multiface are stratified by cost — Adlard sees this — but the corpus doesn't follow the person who can't afford any tier of the system. There's no voice here for the rural poor for whom "personal transportation" means dependency on a car they can't maintain, or the urban poor for whom it means a bus system being defunded to subsidize highway expansion.

O'Neill's space-habitat transportation is genuinely egalitarian in his telling — the commutersphere costs "less than the round-trip cost of a short automobile trip" — but this equality is built into a system designed from scratch, and the corpus never asks how existing transportation inequalities get reproduced in the colony selection process. Who gets to emigrate to the habitat with the maglev?

Clarke's prediction that the city would "begin to die" as communications replaced commuting has a particular class valence that goes unexamined: it describes the experience of the knowledge worker who can work remotely, not the logistics worker, the care worker, the person whose job requires physical presence. In 2025, the geography of remote work has sharpened that distinction into a new form of spatial inequality — but you'd need a different corpus, with different voices, to have seen it coming.