That 1987 newspaper clipping about car phones was right about traffic, just 30 years early

My dad handed me a Yellow Pages ad from our old Harrisburg house that predicted commuters would need radios to avoid gridlock, and now my GPS reroutes me around the same two-lane roads every morning, but he swore it would never catch on, so has anyone else had old advice that was technically accurate but hopelessly late?

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the_joseph1d ago

Whoa, hold on, I gotta disagree there. That prediction wasn't late, it was just aimed at the wrong people. Your GPS is rerouting you because we all decided to live in the suburbs and drive everywhere alone. The gridlock was always coming, we just kept paving over farmland instead of building better bus routes. Those car phone folks saw the traffic part coming clear as day, but they didn't bank on us being too stubborn to change how we commute. So it's not that the advice was late, it's that we ignored it for thirty years and acted surprised when the roads filled up.