I have argued before that ticket barriers are inappropriate for an airport railway: they are an obstacle to passengers, particularly those with luggage and small children. Foreign visitors are unlikely to know how to fiddle the ticketing system or want to tangle with the local police: mistakes in ticket purchase tend to be genuine.

Until recently, barrier gates have been seen as essential for train stations in Great Britain. The Department for Transport has put a requirement to gate stations in its recent franchise agreements - and hit trouble, particularly in places like Sheffield (where a key footbridge links two parts of the city) and York (where the station is a historic structure).

In the recent Greater Anglia franchise consultation document, the requirement to gate stations is diluted. Prospective franchisees are invited to demonstrate the case for gating "if this is considered an appropriate solution". There is an implication that increased staff visibility and a ticketless travel monitoring system might also be appropriate.

This looks like progress.

Ottawa has long been seen as one of the leaders in Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) technology. It has built a network of segregated rights-of-way served by fleets of buses.

Now there are plans to replace this with light rail.

The reason is that the segregated routes - Transitways - run to, but not through, the city centre. There, buses have to share roads with traffic - and there are too many of them! Daily ridership is nearly a quarter of a million: this needs 2600 buses on the streets each day. Within 15 years the system will have run out of capacity.

Solution? Light rail - and light rail in tunnel through the city centre, because a segregated right of way is an absolute necessity.

In 2001, a demonstration project, the O Train, opened in the city's suburbs.

This was called light rail, although in any European city it would have been regarded as a perfectly normal train service operated by ordinary diesel multiple units (which are virtually unknown in North America).

The main defect of the service was that it went from almost no-where to nearly no-where - although, on the way, it did serve a local college and a shopping mall.

It terminated - frustratingly - a couple of kilometres short of the airport. Even more frustratingly, the little-used freight tracks on which the train ran continued on virtually to the terminal: it was difficult to see exactly where they did go, because they were so covered with weeds!

Let us hope that, in the creation of the new light rail system, the city's airport is included in the network.

According to page 133 of the 2009 issue of the Department for Transport's publication, Transport Trends, aviation (international and domestic) now accounts for 23% of all petroleum consumed by transport in the UK.

Rail accounts for 1.3%, and road most of the rest.

Road consumption was growing through the 1980s, but has now levelled off.

See the DfT Transport Trends website.

The headline above is one you are unlikely to see in a newspaper. It's not news. However, the 685 fatalities in 18 accidents were news - because they are so infrequent.

The tragic thing is that giving air and rail accidents undue prominence in the press gives people a distorted idea of how safe those modes actually are, certainly by comparison with road.

I do wonder how many road accidents and fatalities the media are responsible for by their practice of endlessly reporting on rail accidents and thereby telling people railways are "unsafe", for example.

I also deplore the practice of reporting level crossing crashes as "Train wrecks" or "Rail accidents". In 99.9% of cases - at least - the train was the innocent victim: it was the car driver who was responsible, by misuse of the crossing.

The figures above - 685 fatalities, 90 accidents to all aircraft types, are for 2009: for 2008, the figures were 502 and 109.

In the UK, rail accidents seem to be getting more destructive - usually because of the high closing speed of trains in collision. (And, please note, railway privatisation had no impact on the steadily downward trend in UK rail accidents: Andrew Evans has comprehensively researched this). Presumably as aircraft sizes increase, we'll see the same kind of effect - fatalities/accident are likely to increase.

But rail and air are exceptionally safe ways to travel!