(FORTUNE Magazine) – ONE GOOD reason for never predicting the future is that journalists and other curmudgeons occasionally dig up old prognostications to see how they stack up against what actually happened. In 1943, for example, viewers at New York City's Museum of Modern Art saw a film, produced by Sikorsky Aircraft Co., that depicted a future Joe Commuter leaving his apartment building in his own helicopter, hovering for a second, then returning to the rooftop to retrieve his forgotten lunch from his devoted wife before continuing to work. The question a half-century later is not what's wrong with this Jetsonian picture, but rather what, if anything, turned out to be right about it. The answer: absolutely nothing. Helicopters didn't become the cars of the future, most people moved to the suburbs, and today's Joe Commuter can fix his own damn lunch because his wife -- no longer nearly so devoted -- is out commuting herself. Here's the cinema verite version of how it really works nowadays, starring Lynn Austin, a 45-year-old mother of two and chief of reprographics at Martin Marietta's Patriot missile assembly plant in Orlando. The action begins at 5 A.M. in Lakeland, Florida, when our heroine's coffeepot turns itself on. At 5:15, Lynn herself arises, plugs in her curling iron, and crawls to the kitchen for coffee. Her husband, Patrick, who commutes just six miles to his job as an air traffic controller, may still be at work or sleeping late; he has no predictable schedule. By 6:15, Lynn is ready to hit the road. On the way out, she flips on the light in son Michael's room and says to the high school senior, in motherly tones: ''It's 6:15, get out of bed, have a nice day.'' She climbs into her 1987 Nissan 200 SX -- which already has 124,000 miles on it -- places her tiltable coffee cup on the dash, and begins her 54-mile drive to the office, most of it at 75 mph on Interstate 4. She has a traditionalist's view of commuting as ''time to be alone'' and hasn't adopted some of the more popular new in-car practices such as telephoning, reading, faxing, and -- believe it or not -- cooking. A little all-news radio and some Jimmy Buffett or Barry Manilow tapes suffice for Austin. ''I tried motivational tapes for a while, but they bored me,'' she says. ''Sometimes I count tractor-trailers coming the opposite way. The average is about 225.'' On the way in, she says, ''I think about work and psych myself up so I'm ready to start when I get there.'' But on the way home ''I listen to the oldies station, make lists, and chill out.'' Lynn Austin's trip to work is typically American, and getting more so all the time. Today some 108 million Americans commute to work by auto, up more than one-third from 1980. By contrast, no more than six million Americans, or about 5% of commuters, use public transportation, about the same as in 1980. In 1960, Time magazine deemed commuting a phenomenon significant enough to warrant a cover story. Back then, 43 million Americans were estimated to travel to and from work by auto. Sikorsky's wasn't the only vision of the future that seems silly today. Not too long ago, urban planners envisioned 21st-century cities developed along modified versions of the Manhattan model, with commuters pouring into hub cities along spokes of government-subsidized rail lines. Once arrived, monorails and other clean, efficient ''people movers'' would wean us from the inefficiency of automobile commuting. All the while, of course, America was busy building its $100 billion Interstate Highway System, one of the largest public works projects in the history of mankind. Instead of an orderly Commutopia, we got something else entirely: a lot more cars. Americans own more per household -- 1.8 -- than ever before, and we are spending more time than ever behind the wheel. On average, men and women both drive 3,000 miles per year more than they did in 1983. In the same period, vehicle trips have increased in number by 25%, and miles traveled per vehicle have gone up by 41%, according to government studies. Meanwhile, the percentage of commuters using every other means of transport has declined precipitously. NOT ONLY are we driving to work more. Like Lynn Austin, we want to be alone. Despite government and corporate encouragement of car pooling and ride sharing, the best estimate is that there has been a 45% increase in single- occupant vehicles on the road since 1980 -- from 62 million to 90 million. The dominant form of commuting in America is what Alan Pisarski, an independent consultant and one of the country's leading transportation experts, terms the ''Black Hole'': the single-occupant vehicle in a suburb-to- suburb trip. Second most common is commuting within the center city. The traditional suburb-to-center-city commute ranks only third, and in spite of growth in recent years, may turn out to be merely a transitional phase. Why this sea change in the commuting culture over the past decade? There are several reasons: -- Two-thirds of all population growth has gone to the suburbs, mainly in the South and West. -- Jobs have followed people to the suburbs, which now house about 60% of metropolitan workers and account for almost 70% of all job growth. Often, suburban office developments have little or no connection to transit infrastructure. -- Women make up almost half the work force and are driving 50% more miles than they did in 1983. The growing number of double-income families increases the odds that one spouse will have a long commute; as in Lynn Austin's case, it is often the woman. Also, women continue to perform many ''errand'' functions, which makes point-to-point commuting, such as car pooling, impractical. And research shows that many so-called stay-at-home moms are rarely at home; they are out chauffeuring the family, becoming, in effect, commuters. You can blame traffic, like everything else, on the baby-boomers. The same people who clogged the nation's grammar schools, its high schools, and its colleges are now clogging its highways. The good news, says Pisarski, is that ''the shift to the automobile in America is about complete. We have more cars than licensed drivers, more cars than workers.'' Pisarski regards our dependence on cars less as a transportation issue than as a matter of affordable housing. ''Everybody moved to the suburbs to afford a better lifestyle,'' he says, ''so now they drive where they have to for a good job.'' The quantum increase in commuting has wrought a new commuter ethic, which, in its more extreme manifestations, could inspire a film for MOMA far more incredible to the 1943 audience than the helicopter short. At the heart of the new ethic is an obsession to turn drive time into productive time, usually by converting the car into an office. This is made possible by an array of gadgetry and electronic equipment whose popularity is increasing almost exponentially. Some 6.4 million Americans use cellular phones today, vs. only 2,000 in 1983 and a mere half-million as late as 1986. The primary purpose of such phones is something called time shifting, says Stuart F. Crump Jr., columnist for Mobile Office magazine and author of such books as You Can Afford a Car Telephone -- one of which he says he wrote while driving from Washington to Chicago. The idea is to free up large blocks of time at the office by not taking or returning any but the most important calls there. Then, when you're in your car, return the bulk of your calls, letting the other party know where you are to encourage brevity. Also, says Crump, ''quit waiting around the office at the end of the day for the important phone call. Forward it to your car phone and head for home. Shift that waiting time to commuting time.'' In addition to the cellular phone, Crump -- a noncommuter who works from his home office -- lists the other necessary tools for productive commuting: -- A pager, preferably a voice pager, which will transmit messages from your voice mail box so you can screen phone calls. -- A dictation machine, which is really a card-deck-size tape recorder that hooks up to a transcription machine back at the office. Crump wrote his book using one of these. -- A laptop computer. Crump doesn't recommend using one while actually driving, but says it's great to have along for traffic jams.

-- A car fax machine. -- A cassette player, to create what Crump and others call a ''university on wheels,'' for listening to motivational and how-to tapes. Perhaps our new MOMA movie, called something like Wired to Commute, could star John Pistacchi, president of a real estate marketing service called Opticom Corp. in San Jose, California. The entire film is set in his Lexus, which contains a Rubbermaid car desk, some portable files, a Porta-Fax, a portable phone, a pager, and a tiny, voice-activated minicassette recorder. It should be noted here that Pistacchi is an investor in something called the Love to Commute catalogue, which sells a lot of this stuff, but he says he got into the catalogue venture because of his love of the stuff, rather than vice versa, and he swears he uses it all on a regular basis. The fax, for example, is mainly for contracts. ''If I'm halfway between here and San Francisco, my office can call me, and I pull over into a parking lot and connect the fax,'' he says. ''I read the contract, phone in the changes, and I save a day.'' The voice-activated mini-recorder is for capturing ''brilliant ideas'' as they occur. On drives to Los Angeles, he says, he used to be into such motivational tapes as The One Minute Manager, but now he prefers tapes of novels. Silence of the Lambs was a particular favorite. A quick glance through the Love to Commute catalogue makes it pretty clear that some people might as well live in their cars. It features, among many other items, a portable refrigerator, a note pad to clamp to the steering wheel, a light to hook onto books, a book on commuter calisthenics -- it describes 70 stretching, toning, and strengthening exercises -- and a Porta- Oven. One frightening thought, perhaps to scroll across the screen at the end of Wired to Commute: The Campbell Soup Co. predicts that by the year 2000, 25% of all cars will have microwave ovens. An informal survey conducted by the Office of Traffic Safety in -- where else -- California found that, even as you read this, people are doing the following things in their cars: They're changing clothes, shaving, reading magazines, and brushing their teeth. At 60 mph they're eating baked potatoes, canned food, and bowls of cereal. They're changing diapers and nursing babies, grooming their pets and playing the guitar, inserting eye drops and washing clothes. ''One child was seen getting his hair cut while the parent was driving,'' says Peter O'Rourke, director of the Office of Traffic Safety. ''The first time I saw a woman actually flossing her teeth, I was astounded.'' People like O'Rourke have launched a campaign to convince commuters that using their car as an office, a gym, a kitchen, or a barbershop can be, well, a public menace. ''It's impossible to say how many accidents are caused by inattentive driving because those involved are very unlikely to tell the officer they were changing clothes or reading when the accident occurred,'' says O'Rourke's colleague Freda Radich. ''But the likelihood is apparent from what we see on the road.'' EVEN WITHOUT collisions, all this car time isn't good for us, according to Raymond Novaco, professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine. In clinically controlled studies of aerospace, pharmaceutical, and university workers, he found a direct correlation between the distance of a commute and a rise in blood pressure. His studies cite other ravages of commuting: lowered ability to concentrate and to tolerate frustration, short-term memory loss, domestic discord -- even illnesses and absences. No one sees any relief in sight for America's stress-inducing commutes, although in the short run the recession does relieve traffic somewhat, and in the long run the baby-boomers will eventually retire and get off the road. In the meantime, you can always count tractor-trailers. Or you could take a page from the Love to Commute catalogue and order tape number 100588: the Rush Hour Refresher.