HOWZAT

May be right

Christine May is no ordinary MSP. As a former head of Fife council, historically no place for political shrinking violets, May ran a tough regime with a surprisingly progressive transport policy. Pensioners in the Kingdom of Fife have had free bus passes way ahead of Scotland.

So when May writes the dissenting minority report on the Borders railway, those of us who are going to pay for it — and that means us taxpayers — should sit up and take notice. This is a Labour diehard, who has spent real money on public transport systems in the past, presenting a formal minority report saying that the Borders railway, however socially desirable, fails the business case and should not be built.

May’s dissent is a good deal more logical than the committee majority, which criticises the slow progress and shambolic presentation of the railway’s promoters, but continues to back the line in principle. This, remember, is a railway that would fail any professional rail assessment.

Her most chilling statement should have stopped the project in its tracks. “The concerns of the committee over costs, and the propensity of major capital infrastructure costs to rise, have not been addressed by the promoter.”

Rail professionals are already predicting it will cost £200m, or a cost overrun of about a third. If Christine May is worried, we should all be worried.

Big brother

It sounds like the transport manager’s dream, and the wayward driver’s nightmare — software that allows company vehicles to be tracked, both by speed and position, on a single screen.

A Big Brother vision of the future? No, it’s here — and I understand some big Scots companies are looking very closely at it. There’s just the small problem of convincing their fleet drivers of the merits of a system that will track their every move.

CoPilot, which has been developed in conjunction with ALK of America, is cigarette-pack sized, and sits on top of the dashboard, with Bluetooth wireless link to a T-Mobile smartphone. With the phone screen and speaker on, it works exactly like a factory fitted sat-nav which can cost £2000.

But the real breakthrough is the software developed for American truckers. Businesses big and small can put the kits into their delivery vans, work out the quickest routes, and then log into a web page where the position and speed of each van is shown live on a map. Yes, it’s Big Brotherish, but not much more so than truck tachographs.

And at well under £100 per unit, it’s not so much a gimmick, more a business tool.