I find it curious that there are several words for a structure for storing cars while they are not in use.

In the UK this is a multi-storey car park or MSCP.

In German or Scandinavian regions of Europe, it tends to be a Parking-House (ParkHus).

In Canada, it's a Parkade.

What do you call it?

Apart, usually, from a blot on the landscape!

Apparently on the Canada Line automated light metro in Vancouver, the evening peak is much more peaked than the morning peak. Traffic in the evening peak hours is heavier and more concentrated than in the morning peak hours.

This isn't the experience in the UK - is it elsewhere, or is Vancouver unique?

What I'm used to is people all going to work at much the same time, so the morning peak is really confined to 2-3 hours. In the evening, some people rush straight home: others are delayed by meetings, the need to catch up or by socialising or shopping after work.

Is Vancouver the exception, or is it the UK?

On a recent Air Canada flight, the cabin crew came round offering headsets.

When I said, "Yes, please" the response was, "Just one, sir?".

I did wonder where they thought I'd stowed my second head!

I rarely use any form of in-flight entertainment except for the moving map (and Air Canada may wish to know that they would move higher up my list of preferred airlines if they could get theirs to work consistently!).

One thing puzzles me - why do they usually show the external temperature?

The Distance Flown and the Distance to Go is interesting, as is the local time at origin and destination. Ground speed and headwind allow me to guess at the estimated time of arrival even if this is given on the display.

But the outside temperature?

There are all sorts of reasons why I don't want to try to get out of the plane at 36,000 feet: the fact that it's minus 52.8 Farenheit (or minus 47.0 Celsius: thank you for that!) hardly influences my decision!

Any ideas?

I'm tall but not exceptionally so. When I fly, I do like to relax and stretch my legs out under the seat in front. I also like a window seat (and preferably one with a view of more than just the wing!).

A year or two ago, airlines went through a phase of putting a small box under the window seat, just inboard of the window-side seat support. That meant I could only stretch one leg out in front of me - there wasn't room to stretch two! Try sitting like that - no-one would call it relaxing or even comfortable, especially for more than just a few minutes.

I haven't experienced that for a while, but on an Air Canada 777 (seat 32K, if you wish to avoid it!) there was an even bigger box. This meant one could only stretch ones legs out to a limited extent - and on a nine and a half hour flight from London to Vancouver, I did not appreciate this!

I'm not sure what was in the box. I suspect it was the in-flight entertainment, or it could be related to the fact that seat 31K was by the emergency exit.

Whatever it was, it wasn't very comfortable!

I don't think it's odd or even unusual to want to stretch my legs out. And my only use of the in-flight entertainment (IFE) is the map! So I feel really cheated if the IFE infringes on my leg-room!

Don't designers of aircraft interiors ever ride in them? If so, what shape are they?

When you arrive at Vancouver International Airport by air, you are greeted by waterfalls, trees, First Nations art and gleaming spotlessly clean marble. And that's while you are still in the terminal, before you reach baggage reclaim.

The signage is impeccable and incredibly multi-lingual - reflecting the city's impressive diversity.

It's efficient too.

On my travels today, I glanced at the departure screens and saw that the 10:00 to Toronto was at gate C50: I checked again closer to the gate and as I was doing this, one of the airport's help team approached me - "Can I help you find your gate, sir?". Just as well - it turned out that I was heading for Westjet's 10:00 to Toronto and not Air Canada's! My gate was C45. Now I would of course have found that out at some point, but better sooner than later!

Walking around the airport after a meeting there the previous day, I'd been impressed by the toilets. The entrance walls are covered with highly decorative coloured ceramic tiles forming a distinctive pattern. Inside, the pattern is repeated on other vertical surfaces. Today, as I went to gate C45, I used different toilets - and they had a different but equally beautiful pattern of coloured ceramic tiles on the walls.

Everything - everything - looked clean, neat, tidy, friendly. Is Vancouver the world's most beautiful airport?

Tests in India, conducted in cooperation with Japanese experts, have proved that it is possible to run double-stack container trains along lines with overhead electrification.

Stone India, a Kolkata-based company, has developed a pantograph suitable for contact wires at the normal 5500 mm above rail level as well as the enhanced 7450 necessary for double-stack container trains.

The pantograph had to be compatible with existing standards - to use the same mountings, to have similar stability, to have similar weight limits and to be able to deal with strong winds.

How do you say 9:00 or 13:00? Oh-nine-hundred hours? Thirteen hundred hours? So do quite a few people. But should they?

Surely the logic of the system is that 9:00 is nine hours after midnight: 13:00 is thirteen hours after midnight. Why not say so? Some years ago, an announcer at Paddington station used to do just this - he'd announce the departure of "The nine hours train to Swansea". Which sounded odd, but was probably right!

Thirteen hundred hours - well, 1,300 hours after midnight is in about 2 months time!

One of the announcers at Farringdon today talks about the "oh-eight o'clock train" - which confuses the two systems! Twenty-one o'clock sounds even more wrong!

I can't end this blog without a story from when British Railways first started using the 24 hour clock. Someone came to a ticket collector at the station where I worked and asked about trains to Luton. "Well, there's a 21:40, which is twenty to ten, then there's the 22:10, which isn't twenty to anything but ten past ten, then the 22:40 ...". Ah, the customer service of yesteryear!

There was a programme last night on BBC 5 about railway safety. It was "Built by disaster", in the Megastructures series. The thesis, illustrated by the accidents at Eschede, Gare de Lyon and between Perth and Dundee, was that railway safety had improved as a result of detailed investigation of railway accidents.

That is hardly news, and certainly unarguable. It was put rather better and less emotively in L.T.C. Rolt's book, "Red for Danger", first published in 1955 and still in print.

There were however a number of points about the programme which were debateable.

The first part reviewed the Eschede disaster. A broken wheel on one of the leading vehicles damaged a set of points: because of this, the front bogie of one carriage followed one line and the rear bogie followed another. Travelling broadside on, the carriage demolished a road bridge and the rest of the train piled up into it. An Alstom speaker highlighted the safety features of the new AGV train, and it was said that these design improvements made the AGV significantly safer than the ICE, the train involved at Eschede. No doubt true. But if the same thing happened to an AGV - if it hit 300 tonnes of bridge at 200 km/h - no amount of crumple zones, planned deformation and finite element analysis would save the passengers.

The second point is that of responsibility in reporting. Any reporter discussing railway safety risks influencing people to use roads - and these are dramatically less safe. Last night's programme did not make this point. There was an interesting symmetry a few years ago. In Great Britain, 3740 people were killed on the roads. The 5-year average number of fatalities among rail passengers was 3.74 - one-thousandth of that.

This leads to a third point. Any railway accident is thoroughly and comprehensively investigated and examined by experts - both within and independent of the rail industry. The results are published: lessons are learnt and effectively are imposed on railway companies. If the same thing was done for road accidents, we would live on a safer planet. This kind of investigation has been done for railway accidents since the 1840s, so all of the low-hanging fruit has long since been picked: the same is emphatically not true of road accidents.

Finally, what is safety worth? Would people pay for safer travel?

Safety is pretty low on most peoples shopping lists - if it wasn't, they'd never travel by car. Safety is a low priority even when choosing a car - partly because it's a given, partly because "It won't happen to me", and partly because there are more interesting things to look for.

John Adams' book, "Risk and Freedom", is very instructive here - read it.

After one rail accident in the 1980s was investigated and a long and expensive list of recommendations published, one prominent railway manager commented that, "There was no point in having a railway system so safe that no-one could afford to use it".

Railways are exceptionally safe. The transport system as a whole is significantly less safe, because of the lack of attention to road safety. If we wish to improve transport safety, that is where we need to focus. Programmes like this do not contribute to that end.

IARO members - and others - may be interested to know that there is an article on "Current developments in light rail to airports" in the October issue of International Railway Journal.

I was particularly pleased to be able to contribute to this issue, with our Vancouver conference coming up so soon!

For details of the conference, see the Events page of the IARO web-site

Recently I was invited by Bocconi University to participate in a conference being organised by Carlson Wagonlit Travel in Milan shortly. My role was to be interviewed on video about rail and air competition and collaboration: the interview is to be translated and shown to delegates, who will be mainly corporate travel purchasers in Italy.

This gave me a good opportunity to promote IARO's members.

I was asked about competition and cooperation, so I was able to mention the work done by Fraport and Aeroports de Paris in promoting air-rail code-shares. These can replace short-haul flights, to everyone's benefit. I was able to talk about the issues in integrated air-rail ticketing and to mention the micro-sites used by Gatwick Express and Heathrow Express in particular: these allow passengers to book a flight and then click through from the airline booking site to the railway booking site to buy a train ticket in (almost) the same transaction. The excellence of Manchester Airport's regional rail connections was also something I commended.

The last question was about Italy and air rail developments there.

I was able to start by talking about the rail network developments planned for Venice Marco Polo airport which are being designed by One Works. This led on to a discussion of airport expresses - the advantages of a memorable service frequency like that of Heathrow Express (it takes 15 minutes and runs every 15 minutes). I commented that I was glad to hear that Malpensa Express is to be accelerated and diverted to run to Milano Centrale station from December, and highlighted the benefits of that to the time-poor business traveller. And I was able to end with a description of KLIA Ekspres's e-XKL premium service, explaining that I used it after having been travelling for 23 hours and felt that it was solid gold. "Isn't that what we want all of our passengers to feel - that their journey has been so good it was solid gold?", I asked.

I was surprised to see that TAP Air Portugal is still serving beer on board in steel cans. I thought that airlines were so concerned at the cost of fuel that they were doing everything they could to cut down on weight - and surely steel cans are heavier than aluminium? BA use aluminium cans.

What are other airlines doing?

I rode on the new Italian train, the Frecciarossa, yesterday.

I've seen these distinctive 355 km/h (220 mile/h) ETR 500 trains before, but this was my first opportunity to ride one. And I was impressed - I have ridden on the Shanghai Maglev at 432 km/h, but I don't think I've been as fast as 355 km/h on rails.

I rode in standard class between Milano Centrale and Bologna.

It was fairly easy to find the right platform at Milano, despite much reconstruction work being done there. The main departure screens only showed the final destination (Rome, in this case): I had to find the indicator at the head of the platform to check that the train called at Bologna.

The external livery is red (hence the name - Red Arrow). Inside, the seating is comfortable in tables for four. The overall impression is light, bright and airy. They have 12 passenger cars and a power car at each end.

One drawback seems to be that reserved seats carry no indication that they are reserved: if you haven't reserved a seat, you just have to occupy one and hope that no-one turns up to claim it! And, of course, if it's unreserved between Milano and Bologna but reserved on to Rome and you are going the whole way - you lose your seat! The issue led to a lot of discussion on the train I rode!

We left within 33 seconds of the booked departure time of 11:30, so I'll count that as punctual. Don't get me started on the perceived punctuality of trains outside the UK!

These high-speed trains take 65 minutes for the journey, compared with either 105 or 130 by ordinary train.

Announcements were generally in both Italian and English.

We had a one minute dead stand at a signal check while on the conventional line close to Milano, but thereafter ran very smoothly to Bologna. The line runs alongside a motorway: traffic on that seems to be standing still!

The line is well engineered, with wide (by European standards) margins at either side. There are some impressive flying junctions: the network is obviously incomplete, with some lines starting to diverge but with no wires up and not going anywhere, or ballasted formation waiting to have tracks laid.

At regular intervals, there are well-constructed buildings beside the track - probably for maintenance teams.

At various points, there are sound barriers of different heights. Some have transparent polycarbonate for the top metre or so - but when they are very tall, this isn't as much value for the passenger trying to see the countryside as the manufacturers thought! In urban areas, some have attracted graffiti.

The ride was very smooth and quiet: we arrived at Bologna (where there was a four minute station stop time - why so long?) less than a minute late.

Yes, I was impressed.

Note that for the next few months the inter-terminal shuttle between North and South terminals is out of action.

Instead, there is a bus shuttle.

The route to it is well signed, but it is different. At South Terminal, you need to head for the bus station - as you leave the railway station and go into South Terminal, turn left not right. At North Terminal, you need to go up an extra level - to Departures. And you need to allow more time - at least 10 minutes at quiet times and 20 minutes at busy times, rather than the 2 minutes one allows for the Transit.

See Gatwick's website, www.gatwickairport.com

Having tried this, I can vouch for its unpopularity. People did not like using a shuttle bus. I have seen reports that it is adversely affecting BA's traffic from Gatwick - they use North Terminal - and benefiting airlines like BMI.

Is there a better alternative? Ideas, please!

The buses are of reasonable quality, but they are internal airport buses. They have a lot of luggage rack space at the front, entrances front and centre and seating up some stairs at the back. Part of the problem is the circuitous route - particularly at night, when you have few visual clues as to where you are.

There's a sign on the platforms at London Bridge station, one of the major London railway termini.

It says, "Accessible route to platforms and way out".

It points, of course, to a route which is easily accessible, with ramps rather than stairs.

But when I see a wording where a noun or verb is qualified, I often test the effect of reversing or removing the qualification. If you negate this one, you find yourself looking for signs to an inaccessible route! There aren't any, unsurprisingly.

Similarly I remember seeing a toilet in the US labelled, "Handicapped restroom" - and, of course, thought, "Poor restroom!".

Ideas, please, on what the signage should say in these cases!

It needs to be unpatronising, clear and short. I like, for example, the signage on some trains, "Please give up this seat to someone who needs it more than you" - that's non-patronising, and doesn't put people into pigeon holes.

Effective transport - effective public transport - is fundamental to the success of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. On the peak days of the 2012 Olympics, a train will arrive in the Stratford area every 8 seconds. How do the 2016 cities size up - bearing in mind that there is not a lot of time to make fundamental changes to the public transport system?

Rail links to airports are obviously of interest to my organisation, the International Air Rail Organisation (IARO). They are also pretty important to the many visitors, athletes and hangers-on - to say nothing of the world's press - who will attend. Of the 4 leading candidate cities, Chicago and Tokyo have good rail connections to their airports. Madrid has a subway line between Barajas Airport and the office district in the north of the city: Rio de Janiero is considering rail links to its airports.

Madrid and Tokyo are served by high speed rail: Chicago and Rio are not.

Chicago has 11 suburban railway lines with a route length of 798 km: the network has 280 stations and O'Hare airport is served (although not very well). The downside is that some of these lines are "commuter rail" rather than "suburban rail" - they have services inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening and very little in between or after the peaks. No doubt for the Olympic fortnight these could be supplemented.

The city has 7 subway lines extending to 168 km, with 144 stations: both airports are reliably served 24 hours a day.

There is also an ambitious plan to connect both airports to the city and each other by airport express. Under the stimulus of the Olympics, this could well happen. IARO has been involved in the discussions behind this imaginative plan. If it did happen, that really would be a valuable legacy of the Games!

Madrid's suburban network has 9 lines (339 km of route, 118 stations).

An airport connection is planned, for both suburban and high speed trains, supplementing the present subway line connection. Given Spain's recent railway development history, these are highly likely to be in place by 2016.

The metro system has 12 lines, 282 route km and 231 stations. One line connects the government office area with the airport: there are connections from this line to some of the other subway lines.

Rio de Janeiro has a complex 264 km suburban network with 127 stations: an airport connection is planned.

Its 2-line 35 km subway has 32 stations.

Tokyo's extensive suburban network has 60 lines, 2900 route km and 1200 stations: both airports are served.

Its 4 line subway has 281 route km and 282 stations.

If the decision was to be solely on transportation grounds, Tokyo has to be the clear winner.
Madrid probably scores better than Chicago. Its suburban rail system has a better service than Chicago's, which runs on lines shared with intensive heavy freight traffic. Madrid's subway system is also more comprehensive, although less spectacular than Chicago's famous "El"!
Rio, with smaller networks, has to score low.

Rail is best for coping with high volumes of traffic - trains carrying 1300 seated passengers can run every 2 minutes each way on a 2-track railway.

This kind of capacity is necessary for Olympic crowds.

Olympic-driven improvements to the rail network leave a valuable legacy, as we are starting to see in London. The infrastructure can be used for 40 years: rolling stock, while not infinitely "go-anywhere", can certainly be used after the event in a wide range of places. Improved signalling can provide extra capacity for commuters way into the future, and enhanced ticketing and information systems will be useful for the rest of their lifetime.

Many visitors will not have cars available: buses and coaches are valuable but have a lower capacity than rail. They are useful for serving more dispersed areas, but not for the intensive flows to the main centres.

The city which wins will need to gear up very quickly. Capacity improvements will need to be planned into a dense urban fabric - not an easy task. There is a lot of valuable experience available from past Olympic cities - and of course from London. It will be almost essential for the winner to draw on this to ensure success.

There are two absolute certainties. The event cannot be postponed, and the eyes of the world will be on that city during the Games.