I am always impressed by Utah Transit Authority, in Salt Lake City - now busy building their Airport Light Rail Line, likely to be completed this year.

Paul O'Brien, their Rail Services General Manager, gave an impressive presentation on their use of social media at the recent annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board.

Apart from the content of his presentation (excellent - entertaining and with real content) I was impressed by the style. Yes, he used a Powerpoint presentation: yes, there were a few good and relevant pictures. But interspersed among these were slides which had one to four simple words in white on a black background - and that was it! Wow! Powerful!

When talking about the development of their much-used twitter system, for example, he talked about the three stages of implementation - initial research, initial growth, and the present steady-state stage. These he described as Seeding, Feeding and Weeding. Each was introduced by a one-word slide, to which he spoke.

This of course is the complete antithesis of some speakers, who try to cram as many words as possible onto a slide (and then limply apologise - 'You probably cannot read this' - to which the obvious rejoinder is, 'Well why did you show it then?').

Many local buses in the US are equipped with racks on the front, to carry up to three bikes - something I have yet to see on this side of the Atlantic.

It brings problems as well as benefits - particularly the problem of delay, while they are loaded and unloaded.

Another problem is that - amazingly - they are sometimes not collected by their owners at the end of their bus ride.

The local transit agency in Columbus, Ohio, recently managed to dispose of 49 abandoned bikes in an imaginative way. After keeping them for 60 days for owners to claim them, they gave them to a local not-for-profit agency, the Mid-Ohio Foodbank. The bikes were spruced up by the local fire brigade: they were then passed on to local children for Christmas as part of the 'Firefighters 4 Kids' programme.