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Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and (for a brief moment) plausibly electable Democratic presidential candidate, will run Joe Biden’s Department of Transportation, Politico and other outlets are reporting. It’s a bit of a surprise to most observers: South Bend is a small city without a huge transit system, and the buzzed-about figures were high-profile big-city rail-and-road experts like New York’s Polly Trottenberg and Sarah Feinberg and Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel. But transportation is a technocrat’s game, and putting a Harvard and McKinsey alumnus in place does make a certain kind of sense. And given how good the trains are in northern Europe, maybe he can pick up an idea or two from his Norwegian reading.
