Bad Prediction

I was sorting through some long-neglected books on shelves in my house when I came across Northern Virginia Challenges: The 1990s and Beyond, published in 1989 by George Mason University and edited by former Congressman Joseph L. Fisher and Richard T. Mayer, a policy analyst at SRA Technologies in Arlington.

In a chapter on transportation written by Wilfred Owen (not the poet of the Great War but rather a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution) we find this opening paragraph:

Soon after the beginning of the twenty-first century, the people of Northern Virginia will be marveling at the smooth flow of traffic on their once-overloaded highways. They will feel justly proud of the high quality of life in Northern Virginia's regional network of urban villages, interconnected by fast transport and telecommunications in a setting that preserves the beauty of Virginia's rural landscape.

For those of you who, like me, are incredulous at this prediction, I have appended a jpeg of the first page of this essay.



H/T to Steven C. Latimer for spotting this page of the book.

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