“Are We Heading to the Day Everything Stops?” The query (the headline omitting, oddly, the question mark) comes from the editors of the venerable but by this time shaky Saturday Evening Post near the end of 1968.  The apocalyptic overtones of the headline notwithstanding, you have to admit that the cover illustration is kind of fabulous, almost festive.  Maybe they thought about this hitting the mailboxes right before Christmas, and wanted the Post’s readers to have a little fun?

Cities of Tomorrow

The cover is by illustrator Gene Holtan, and he clearly turned to classic futuristic cartoons and illustrations of the turn of the last century, ca. 1890-1910, for inspiration.  (If you want to see more of these and other visions of “yesterday’s tomorrows,” set your dial to www.paleofuture.com).  Inspired–”horrified” might be a better word–by the nightmarishly exploding growth of cities both upward and outward, illustrators conjured cities of the future jammed with impossibly tall skyscrapers, criss-crossed and pierced by fantastic transit systems, their towers strafed by phalanxes of flying machines, their streets and stacked-up highways choked with a gridlock of wheeled conveyances, their people– well, “people,” per se, can hardly be glimpsed.

Gridlock and “Near Collapse”

The editors of the Saturday Evening Post suggest here that 1968 was similarly full of warning bells–and this time the “future shock” had to do with massive infrastructural gridlock.  ”We are going very fast just to stay where we are,” the editors write.  The nation has a choice of where it will be in 25 years (that is, 1993):  ”Either an efficiently computerized and integrated transportation system . . . or an air-land-and-sea traffic jam so enormous that it will bring our entire society to a virtual standstill.”  There is an article on the nation’s urban freeways and the choking rush-hour traffic; interestingly, two of the aerial views are of jammed freeways that were, in fact, subsequently torn down or buried (San Francisco’s Embarcadero elevated freeway and Boston’s “Big Dig”).  A scary article follows about the air-traffic control system (”approaching near collapse,” with “200 near-collisions a month”).

The solution?  ”Automated highways.  500-mile-an-hour trains. Underground ‘bullets’ linking our cities. . . . But we’ve barely begun.”