I recently made what should have been a short ride on Washington's metro, involving one change of train.

The short ride became a long one, because of the 24 minutes I spent waiting for trains - 14 minutes for a Blue Line train at Pentagon Centre and ten minutes for the Orange Line at Rosslyn.

Twelve minute intervals between trains, introduced as an economy measure, are clearly not unusual: allow plenty of time if you are travelling on WMATA!

I also really noticed how dark the stations are - lighting too has been cut back.

How often do you use on-line booking systems for hotel or flight bookings - and how often do you swear at their design faults?

Let's ignore the many US systems which assume that everyone has a 5-digit zip code and a 10 digit phone number and move to those which really ought to know better.

I recently wanted to book a meal for IARO members at a specific Marriott hotel in Hong Kong. I went to the hotel web-site, clicked on Meetings - and was taken to the general Marriott functions web-site, asking me where in the world I wanted to hold my function! I managed to get back to the right part of the forest in the end!

When booking a hotel, I like those sites which automatically assume you are staying one night - so you enter your arrival date and the departure date is automatically generated (and easy to edit). Those which do not - which insist on me putting in both arrival and departure date, and delight in telling me that "Departure date is before arrival date" if I omit to do this are unpopular!

Similarly with flight booking systems, and especially the multi-city options, it is reasonable to assume that the arrival airport at the end of flight 1 is the same as the departing airport at the start of flight 2. It is so easy to generate this as a default - alterable, of course, if necessary. So why doesn't everyone do it?

It also irks me when I am allowed to enter "London" as a generic departure point (as an alternative to selecting from a list including Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, London City, Biggin Hill and Londonderry) and then being told that London is ambiguous and I have to enter a specific airport! If that's the case, why offer me the option in the first place?

Emirates is one of the many sites which has a pop-up calendar on its booking web-site which facilitates the entry of travel dates. The calendar tool is good but only some people use it sensibly. When you enter the date of one flight, some sites blank out previous dates so that you can't return before you go - eminently sensible.

Emirates' multi-city option is good: enter the first leg of your journey, hit Plus and you can enter another (or hit Search to find fares and times for the sectors you've entered). Some airlines limit the number of sectors you can enter on a multi-sector journey - and the limit is always one less than I need!

And when booking multi-sector flights, it is nice (thank you, Continental Airlines) to be offered "This airline only", "Code-share partners only" or "All airlines". OK, the price may be a bit higher if you leave an alliance, but let's have the choice!

So, BA, when I express a wish to go London - Los Angeles - New York - London, I expect to be offered a direct flight between Los Angeles and New York on your alliance partner American Airlines (remember them?). I do not expect to be offered a routing on an overnight flight via Heathrow - I'm doing this routing to try to avoid overnight flights!

On a recent daytime BA flight back from Boston to London,the "light snack before arrival" included penne pasta with what looked like a vegetable sauce.

This came with a spoon with which to eat it.

Eating penne with a spoon is certainly possible - as a whole plane-load of people quickly found out - but certainly neither convenient nor conventional!

Question: did the provision of a spoon rather than a fork save money, weight or thought?

The driving licence is no longer the first aspiration of a teenager in the US.

Trends are analysed in a recent article in "Advertising Age". The analysis shows that licence holding among, for example, 18 year olds has dropped from 86% in 1978 to 68% in 2008.

The article can be found on the Advertising Age web-site.

Similar trends apply to all teenage years - indeed, at the very end of the article, a comparison of overall licence holding by age group shows that licence holding has declined in all age groups between 1998 and 2008.

There is speculation about why this trend should have happened, particularly among the young.

Some States have increased minimum driving ages: some have tightened requirements. The inability to use portable electronic devices and an interest in the environment are seen as other causes.

The same trend is apparent in the UK: driving licence holding in the 17-21 year old cohort has been dropping for some time, and has only shown a slight uptick in the last set of statistics.

Interesting!