Comments on: Magic Highway U.S.A.

Magic Highway U.S.A.

kirkaracha — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:20:44 -0800

Magic Highway U.S.A. Disney's May 1958 view of the future of transportation. Some recaps at 2719 Hyperion and Paleo-Future. [IMDB; via]

By: the dief

the dief — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:37:09 -0800

Some of the suggestions are highly goofy, but it's hard not to be charmed by the optimism and the visual style. Man, I wish I lived in the future.

By: TrialByMedia

TrialByMedia — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:57:15 -0800

This video was awesome. It's amusing how similar the decentralized urban center of the future looks to Soviet style planned communities. Observe the former DDR city Halle-Neustadt and Krakow, Poland's Nowa Huta. The complete lack of concern about energy usage in these proposals is hilarious--of course, by 1970 all energy would be supplied by nuclear reactors. I also really enjoyed the way the woman was automatically shoved off to the shopping centers.

By: not_on_display

not_on_display — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:06:44 -0800

This woulda been our future if it weren't for that meddling Ralph Nader. tap, tap... damn, my on-board sarcasm meter is on the fritz.

By: autodidact

autodidact — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:07:17 -0800

Your wikipedia links are in Polish, Trial...

By: nax

nax — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:09:56 -0800

They got some stuff right: suburban sprawl facilitated by the highway system, more or less predicts GPS, and spot-on with container shipping. But yeah, don't worry about fuel. In the "hey what about my jet-pack category"-- flying ambulances and cantilevered mountain highways. Plus as a mommy, I apparently don't have to work. I get to go shopping with Junior. Cool. And love the graphics and the music. Nice post.

By: TheNewWazoo

TheNewWazoo — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:15:42 -0800

As a junior, I'm glad I didn't have to spend my days shopping with mom. Ick. I think the common thread is the cheap availablility of endless energy. It seems to me that nearly all of the predicitions that failed to pass have to do with that. Which makes sense - think of how much portable energy density and distribution grids had grown in just the last 50 years. I'll bet it really did seem that we'd all have handheld nuclear reactors by now.

By: wfc123

wfc123 — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:27:44 -0800

"Get to that shopping center ASAP". They got that part right. And they got the rear view camera in the car thing right.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:33:03 -0800

Your wikipedia links are in Polish, Trial... I think the first link is German, and I'm pretty sure the second link is in English.

By: timsteil

timsteil — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:45:22 -0800

Great video...but I still want a jetpack!

By: mathowie

mathowie — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:46:13 -0800

I love the idea that all highways will be illuminated from inside and contain radiant heating to keep them dry and unfrozen. I can't imagine what the energy costs of something like that would be.

By: TrialByMedia

TrialByMedia — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:52:15 -0800

Your wikipedia links are in Polish, Trial... I think the first link is German, and I'm pretty sure the second link is in English. Yes, it's German. There was no English language article for Halle-Neustadt. Just look at the pictures.

By: rusty

rusty — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:12:21 -0800

In 1958, wasn't it already obvious that we were not going to be using radiation to melt holes in mountains, unless we were totally unconcerned about the area being habitable by any life for the next couple hundred million years?

By: picea

picea — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:12:43 -0800

Man, I'd love it if cars were automated. Sure, driving is fun, but people are so stupid and putting them in the control of a big, fast hunk of metal makes them stupid and dangerous. I think by the age of 60 I'm going to be too terrified to drive at all. It's wearying to see all the potential accidents waiting to happen.

By: MythMaker

MythMaker — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:18:37 -0800

The Jetsons isn't far off this kind of optimism. But, yeah, I kept thinking about the energy costs and "who's going to pay for this?'' Instead of everyone paying through taxes to have an air conditioned road, we've gone for each individual car air conditioning itself. It seems there's just a ton of central planning and control going on in all of these scenarios of this period - the truck/trains being centrally controlled, and much of this period involves central controls of cars driving, as well. We've discovered, though, as we move to the future, that individual controls work better. I mean, we've got cars that steer themselves on interstates now, and cars that can parallel park themselves now... I think if we ever go fully automated that some kind of P2P system with cars communicating amongst themselves, as well as sensors for detecting the surrounding environment of the car make more sense than some kind of central planning. The only place where you really see that kind of centralized organization in action is with air traffic controllers, and that's mostly because there's a finite number of planes, and a screwup is so catastrophic that there's no margin for error.

By: kirkaracha

kirkaracha — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:29:46 -0800

I liked how the suggested safe speed was 85 miles an hour.

By: Pollomacho

Pollomacho — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:48:25 -0800

I love how massive urban sprawl and the destruction of the central city by massive highway systems driving people out into the commuter hinterlands was seen as a good thing.

By: sonic meat machine

sonic meat machine — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:54:01 -0800

And don't forget the airborne emergency vehicles to clear the corpses off the expressway ASAP, Pollomacho!

By: poweredbybeard

poweredbybeard — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:05:14 -0800

It's so adorable, the quaint belief that all that wealth being generated was going to naturally be put toward a shared ease of living. Heated highways? Not only is that frivolous (and a ridiculous idea), but well beyond the bare minimum needed to get people to and from work, and so a non-starter. The wealthy were never interested in the middle classes' comfort, only their spending and labour power.

By: wierdo

wierdo — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:29:16 -0800

MythMaker, a large part of the central planning bit was driven by the lack of microprocessors at that time. Until then, it wouldn't have seemed feasible for an individual vehicle to have enough computing power to drive itself, at least not without it being the size of a bus and still having a cramped passenger compartment. If we really had electricity that was too cheap to meter, heated highways would be a great idea. As would climate controlled covered highways in certain terrain. rusty, radiation doesn't magically last forever. Gamma rays, for example, will heat stuff up famously, yet like light or radio waves, does not persist. I could go on a diatribe about people being so ill-informed about radiation and how that has been a significant harm to us in the last 20 or 30 years, and perhaps has doomed us all to what may already be inescapable global warming, but that would be out of place.

By: mattoxic

mattoxic — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:04:09 -0800

The magic highway, isn't that Sweden? I'm sure they have sun-powered-electro-suspension cars.

By: rongorongo

rongorongo — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:39:57 -0800

I love the idea that the existence of a mapping and navigation system necessarily meant that cars could simply be told "follow this route" while the passengers caught up with their TV shows. It is food for thought for anybody who has occasionally felt they are the weakest link between the GPS and the steering wheel.

By: that girl

that girl — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:15:26 -0800

I love this announcer. So Much. From all the Disney shorts.

By: brandz

brandz — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:17:37 -0800

i blame bush.

By: dhammond

dhammond — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:03:27 -0800

I love stuff like this. Tx for posting.

By: Davenhill

Davenhill — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 02:10:54 -0800

Self-driving cars would be fantastic. You could drive everywhere hammered and butt naked, like god intended. Unfortunately somewhere along the line we decided not to spend trillions of dollars on mass transit and other ways to improve our communities and instead handed the money over to the military industrial complex. But hey, at least we can see some of that cool, futuristic space age technology at work at military air shows. You know, for a few hours every couple of years. Oh, and apparently most people in the world hate us for some reason. Huh, hard to get a laugh when the joke's on you, I guess. Better luck next revolution.

By: Mister Cheese

Mister Cheese — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:39:38 -0800

They're developing self driving cars already thanks to DARPA. I say this because Stanford got second place in DARPA's Urban Challenge and it's been in the papers. Apparently they've got it to where cars can drive themselves reliably while following traffic laws and not hitting people or buildings. So there are self driving cars out there. The technology already exists and has been tested. The question is: will it ever amount to more than just military use?

By: JJ86

JJ86 — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:57:09 -0800

Go Team Venture! It's great to see unmitigated zeal for visionary futurism which is separated from the realities of the dollar and the average user.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:24:20 -0800

The Jetsons isn't far off this kind of optimism. Indeed. I'll bet cash money the opening titles of the Jetsons and many of the concepts were inspired directly by this film. Sure, their cars flew, but the Googie architecture and all weren't far off. In 1958, wasn't it already obvious that we were not going to be using radiation to melt holes in mountains 1958 was arguably the peak of the Atoms for Peace ideal. The USSR studying using nukes to blast enormous canals across Siberia -- an idea endorsed by Edward Teller in the 1958 Plowshare program. Atmospheric testing wasn't even banned until the early sixties. You have to laugh at some of this -- I did. Some of it is just as much fantasy as the Road to Tomorrow exhibit by Norman Bel Geddes at the GM Futurama pavilion for the 1939 World's Fair. Other stuff they're stabbing at but would take a different path. They didn't forsee the standard shipping container for trucks, trains, and ships, for example. On the other hand, we DO have heads-up displays and rear-view video. And businesspeople DO videoconference on ... well, trains and planes, anyway. With highway Wi-Fi we might be able to do it in cars as well, or maybe video cell phones will meet that need sufficiently. (Of course, they imagined their everyman as a businessman, but in this industrialized view of the future many people would be working in less independent positions.) I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the idea of the massive road-building machine spreading concrete across a pristine landscape, or the cantilevered highways "preserving the beauty" of the canyons, or driving practically up the nose of invaluable cultural patrimony like the Sphinx. (Not that the growth of Cairo has really helped.) And yes, there's more than a hint of massive central planning. How else could you build all those roads and cities, and create the volume necessary for food or products to be assembled off site and delivered ready to buy with nary a floor manager's intervention? But this was before Goldwater and "We will bury you!" It wasn't the central planning that galled, it was who was doing it and why. Two systems, both believing that science would dictate what products would be need by whom and when, if you just did the math right. And they hadn't even heard of Wal-Mart.