Mayor Pete, Rolling Stone tweeted, was going to make transportation “sexy” again. You wondered if he was requiring supermodels and Chippendale dancers to twerk on the roof of the buses, but no. It’s the usual stuff you get from a wonky guy and a Democratic administration. Electric cars and trains, which are maybe sexy if you’re a Transformer.

Since this is 2021, though, everything has to be fed through the filters of wokenism, gilded with the magic words of “justice” and “equity.” Mayor Pete tweeted a graphic about “relative pedestrian danger by race and ethnicity,” noting that black or African-American people and American Indians or Alaskan Natives are in greater danger than Asians, whites, and Hispanics. The graphic’s peculiar title: “The burden is not shared equally.”

We need car–pedestrian accident equity to rearrange the burden. There are a few ways to do this.

(1) Make certain the software for self-driving cars contains anti-racist algorithms that take into account historical injustices and accelerate or decelerate accordingly.

(2) Create public awareness about jaywalking, just as they did in the early days of the auto. If you listen to the people who loathe the invention of cars and wish everyone were still jammed into trolleys among BO-emitting citizens wearing odorous wet woolen coats and exhaling gusts of halitosis, the pre-car days were a halcyon urban paradise: People just milled around in the streets without fear. Oh, sure, a horse might nudge you, but it was one of those things that put a fellow in touch with nature, especially if Dobbin dumped a bushel of hindquarter apples on your shoe.

Once the murderous automobile was invented, auto­makers invented the concept of the “jaywalker” to clear the way for cars and let them rule the streets where the perambulator was once sovereign. Devious and self-serving as this may have been, it probably had the salutary effect of flinging fewer people into the air, so maybe try that again.

(3) Step up traffic enforcement in the neighborhoods that have the most accidents. Where I live, drivers have begun to regard red lights with breezy contempt. There aren’t any cops around to light up the scofflaws and pull them over. But even if they stepped up enforcement, would it be worth the trouble to the driver? Just because someone blows through an intersection like a cruise missile through a day care doesn’t mean the driver should be “justice-system involved.” At the most, social workers on bikes should pursue the vehicle, take down the license plate, and then add it to a database of people who are “experiencing haste” and might need some mental-health resources.

The pitch that really infuriated was Mayor Pete’s suggestion of a mileage tax.

“I think that shows a lot of promise,” Buttigieg said in a press conference. “If we believe in that so-called user-pays principle, the idea that part of how we pay for roads is you pay based on how much you drive.”

If only they taxed gas for the same purpose! I know, I know — don’t give them any ideas.

One Twitter user, who’s a filthy commie — his user name was “SwampCommunist,” so one may assume he’s a moist, moss-draped commie — objected: “Just build some railways and busses so that people don’t have to own/use cars.”

Problem solved! When someone asked how trains and buses would be funded, the swamp commie’s answer was obvious to anyone who wasn’t brainwashed by car culture: “Fewer drivers means cheaper infrastructure. You can downsize the DMV, cut public drivers ed, get rid of traffic cops, smaller bridges, fewer parking lots, and of course, fewer roads. If that’s not enough, the city will recoup the cost through bus fare.”

California is spending eleventy nine gatrillion dollars per mile on a new rail system, and this guy thinks you can pay for a nationwide train system by reducing the hours of public-employee driver’s-ed instructors.

To properly assess a mileage tax, one of two things has to happen. Either people self-report, thereby creating a new category of criminal offense that can be assessed or ignored at the whim of the officials — try to imagine Hunter Biden suffering consequences for not reporting his mileage. Or there will be devices in our cars that tattle to the panopticon state. Ridiculous! Spying on me and reporting my movements — that’s my cellphone’s job.

Obvious objections: Won’t this have a bad effect on rural residents? Sure, but they should live in cities anyway, and the mileage-tax money will pay for a robust bus system that goes all the way out to the farmhouse four times a day.

Right. Sure. But what about the poor? They have cars, too. Yes, but (a) they shouldn’t, because it makes polar bears drown, and (b) there can be a program that rebates the cost. The government could tie their VIN to their Social Security number and automatically deposit the funds in their state-provided account!

CNN headline, 2031: “With no evidence, conservatives call mileage rebate for the poor ‘another opportunity for fraud.’”

Fox News headline, 2032: “Man arrested for disconnecting 50 mileage reporters, driving them around all day, collecting rebates.”

Cities need robust public-transportation systems that help the carless and poor get around cheaply and easily. People who have cars want good roads. It can be done woke-free. After all, most drivers think “critical race theory” is just figuring out how to pass the slow car in front so that you can make the next green light.