The future, according to the folks who make the renderings, will be built mostly around whooshing. The details differ from one imagined utopia to the next, but the broad strokes are the same. Cars will run on electricity, drive themselves, even fly. Networks of vacuum tubes and tunnels will connect cities to each other and to the hinterlands. Supersonic jets will turn transoceanic journeys into river crossings. The burning of fossil fuels will seem as remote and unsavory as human sacrifice. Trees will blanket the urban centers; the air will refresh our lungs instead of blackening them.

Moving about the planet will be faster, safer, easier, comfier, greener, cheaper, and whooshier. Best of all, there will be no traffic.

So say the renderings, of which there are many. They’re created by all the players who imagine themselves profitably managing this future—Elon Musk chief among them, but also Lyft and Uber, Ford and General Motors, and innumerable startups.

Ford—which now calls itself a mobility company as well as an automaker—is among the many companies pitching a new, utopian vision of the future. FOrd

Americans have been given a glimpse of this sort of transportation paradise before. They stood under the hot sun for hours at a time to see it, because they were fed up with traffic, and any world that promises to end it is worth a look. And so millions of people made it up a winding ramp and into a mysterious building and sat in the navy blue mohair chairs that would ferry them through the marquee exhibit of the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The progenitor of the optimism-soaked hybrid of amusement park and educational diorama later perfected by Walt Disney, Futurama was a 17-minute pitch by General Motors that showed its audience a world that had solved transportation by signing over the ground floor of city and country to the car. Everyone in the picture had the keys to that era’s smartphone, the device that unlocked access to a world of wealth and convenience.

That vision, for the most part, came true. Futurama predicted the world of 1960. By that new decade, the personal car was in fact dominant, suburbs reigned supreme, and the highway was everyone’s my way. We still live in Futurama today, but it doesn’t feel like utopia. We are locked in a transportation monoculture, reliant on machines that are bad for the planet, bad for the economy, bad for the soul. And, my god, the traffic.

What the hell happened to the future? And how do we stop it from happening again?