I'm a transport planner who lives in London. An elder statesman amongst local transport planners once told me the following story. "Once there was a sheik that

I'm a transport planner who lives in London. An elder statesman amongst local transport planners once told me the following story. "Once there was a sheik that was planning to make a £3B investment in a new real estate development in Canary Wharf [located about 5 miles east of the city centre]. Plans had been drawn up, and everything was in place and ready to go -- with one hitch: the sheik wanted to see the site for himself. Wouldn't sign the on the dotted line until he'd walked around and kicked its metaphorical tyres a bit. "The problem is, if you're a billionaire sheik you you have to stay in a a certain class of hotel, and there just wasn't anything appropriate in Canary Wharf. So he found a nice place in the West End [about 3 miles west of the city centre]. He flew in, spent the night there, and went to see the site first thing in the morning, around rush hour. "The other problem is, if you're a billionaire sheik, you don't just hop on the tube with everybody else. So, he hired a limousine and said 'take me to Canary Wharf!'. "Two hours later, the limousine was still crawling past the Tower of London [about 1 mile east of the city centre]. They'd managed an average speed of 2 miles per hour. The sheik was fuming. Any property this hard to access surely had to be worthless. 'Driver!' he said, 'Change of plans. Take me to Heathrow.' "And that's how 3 billion pounds of investment died in traffic." You can bet that the London team pitching to the IOC were very well aware of this story.