AUSTIN, Texas — Years ago, what did you imagine the future would look like? Maybe like “The Jetsons,” “Blade Runner” or “Back to the Future Part II”?
Those views of the future are far from what we see today.
As we approach the year 2025, we wanted to see what local experts in the past thought life in Austin would look like. We took a deep dive into the KVUE archives and found a news series from 1980 that peered into the future to forecast how Austin would change by the year 2000.
Former KVUE reporter Rick Hull interviewed some experts to hear their predictions about Austin. And although we’re almost 25 years past that date, we discovered things in 2000 and today are quite a bit different than people thought they’d be.
In one report, Hull explored what Downtown Austin might look like in the year 2000.
“Architect Sinclair Black sees this as a section of our downtown area, where the buildings are no more four stories tall, built right to the edge of property lines but open in the center for the public, with parks and playgrounds and public spaces,” Hull said.
It was an intriguing vision for a future downtown. But, as we know, high-rise buildings and a seemingly endless number of cranes dominate Austin’s skyline today.
In another story from 1980, City of Austin transportation planners made predictions about how people living in suburbs would get downtown in 2000.
“The person would probably be picked up by a very small bus which served that residential area, and they would be brought into a local or area terminal,” the planners predicted. “And from that terminal, they would board a larger bus, which would then bring them into the Central Business District.”
City planners also predicted that light rail transit would become an economic practicality to move large numbers of people to and from popular areas.
“We could either construct those so that they ran in the air like a monorail system, or in areas like the University of Texas and the Capitol Complex, they might run below-grade underground like a subway system,” according to the news report.
A few of those predictions were generally correct. Buses still play a large role in Austin’s transportation system, and we have a limited light rail. But a subway system? Not yet.
Not every prediction was wrong. Hull said computers would likely take over our daily lives by the beginning of the 21st Century. Personal computers – only in their infancy in 1980 – have indeed become a vital part of our lives today.
But other predictions, like the guess that many of us would be living in round houses with tiny kitchens and shag carpeting? Well, many are probably thankful that one didn’t come true.