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Photograph by Nancy Johnson

By Cynthia Scott

Imagine a transportation system built to cater to bicyclists and pedestrians. That was the challenge issued to 300 people, many of them policymakers, who attended the fifth James L. Oberstar Forum on Transportation Policy and Technology, Transportation Choices: The Important Role of Walking and Biking, at Coffman Memorial Union in April.

Berthold Tillman, the mayor of Munster, Germany, was on hand to nudge along any naysayer who might think such a vision is out of reach. Munster, voted the Worlds Most Livable City by the United Nations in 2004, is a haven for non-motorized transportation. In the city of 300,000 people where Januarys average temperature is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, 35 percent of all daily travel is conducted on bicycles and another 25 percent occurs by foot and mass transit. It is inconceivable what it would be like if even half the bicyclists in Munster came into town in a car, Tillman said.

Tillman presented a slide show highlighting the city's bike-friendly infrastructure, including bike service stations, designated bike streets, and underground bike parking. He noted that the city's commitment to the bicycle is an economic boon: It saves on street repair and maintenance expenditures, attracts millions of dollars in tourism, and significantly cuts health care costs.

Sponsored by the University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies, the forum is named for 15-term Minnesota Rep. James L. Oberstar. Oberstar has gained national prominence for preaching the gospel of integrating biking and walking into the transportation mainstream and has been instrumental in passing legislation toward that end. He opened the forum by calling for a sweeping change of lifestyle habits among Americans. Our job is not just to recite dreary statistics [about the benefits of walking and biking], but to change lives, Oberstar said. We have to change the habits of an entire generation and make this the bicycling century.

Oberstar also proffered a vision of what he fears. My view of Armageddon is that day when were all sitting on the freeway, hands gripped on the steering wheels, and we run out of that last drop of gas. And one by one, the car doors start opening and people look around and ask, How do you walk?

Overheard on Campus

"We go on these trips to help others, but really, in the end we help ourselves."

-- University of Minnesota student Laura Carter, who spent her spring break with other college students doing good work such as neighborhood cleanup or serving the homeless in cities around the country on the Pay It Forward tour.

"I think it is a terrible thing when a person has a huge win like that because it will negatively affect him and others just to . . . be deluded that they can win that amount again."

-- David Koeplin, director of the compulsive gambling treatment program at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, Fairview, commenting on the news that University journalism student Mike Schneider won $1 million in a poker tournament over spring break.

"Regardless of ones opinion on the issue of abortion, we might expect the governor of [Hubert H.] Humphreys home state to attribute his words to their author, and to use them in the context of their original meaning."

-- Steve Sandell, director of the Humphrey Forum at the University's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, criticizing South Dakota governor Mike Round for his choice of words in defending his states legislative action making abortion illegal: In the history of the world, the true test of a civilization is how well people treat the most vulnerable and most helpless in their society.

"We've got an interstate between our stadium and our students."

-- University of Minnesota law student Joshua Colburn

Hit "Send" at Your Own Risk

By Cynthia Scott

A word to the wise: Your e-mail is nothing more than a bit of data ripe for plucking out of cyberspace by anybody who knows how to do the plucking. And, if you think you have legal or Constitutional recourse should that happen, think again.

Adjunct University law associate professor Stephen Cribari, Denver attorney Richard Reeve, and computer forensics specialist Mary Horvath at the FBI in Quetico, Virginia, all who specialize in legal issues related to cyberspace, explored this and other emerging concerns associated with new communications technology at the fourth Silha Center Forum—“Your E-Mail Is Not Yours: Government Surveillance and Digital Privacy”— sponsored by the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The three agreed that new communications technology has created a legal no man’s land where there is uncertainty about whether privacy rights exist at all. The problem is, many everyday users assume that the old protections apply to the new technology. Not true. “The question of what’s private in cyberspace is not a simple one,” Cribari said. One reason is confusion about language. For example, you can throw away this article by crumpling it and putting it in a wastebasket, confident it will eventually be incinerated. On the other hand, when you “throw away” that e-mail missive you wrote to your ex, you simply transfer it to a new part of your computer, where it resides indefinitely.

That may not be news to the cyberspace-savvy, but to multitudes of everyday users, it’s a revelation. And not a welcome one. “When you hit the ‘send’ button, you give up all expectations of constitutionally protected privacy,” Reeve asserted. Horvath, an expert at retrieving data from hard drives, had some advice of her own. When it comes to e-mail, she said, “Nothing is safe. Nothing. The best way to protect yourself, which no one does, is encryption. Know what’s going on with your information and try the best you can to protect yourself.”