Leadership Quote by Gaylord Nelson

Nelson’s prediction reads less like a gee-whiz tech forecast than a political dare. The internal combustion engine isn’t treated as an inevitable feature of modern life; it’s framed as a policy choice that can be reversed on a timetable. “Disappear from the streets of our cities” is doing the rhetorical heavy lifting: he’s not arguing cars will vanish, but that cities should stop being designed around gasoline traffic. The target is urban air, noise, injury, and the quiet coercion of car dependency.

The phrasing also smuggles in a moral hierarchy. “Mass transportation” comes first, “or probably electrical power” second, implying that electrifying private vehicles is an acceptable fallback but not the primary vision. That ordering matters. Nelson is gesturing toward a civic model where movement is shared, efficient, and publicly stewarded - transit as a kind of infrastructure democracy - rather than simply swapping one drivetrain for another and keeping the same spatial inequities.

Context sharpens the intent. Nelson, best known as the founder of Earth Day and a key environmental legislator, was speaking from an era when smog-choked cities and oil politics made the costs of combustion newly undeniable. The “next thirty years” horizon is classic agenda-setting: close enough to demand action, long enough to make transformation thinkable. The subtext is that technological change won’t save us by itself. If the engine is going to “disappear,” someone has to make it happen: through regulation, investment, and the political courage to reclaim streets from cars.