👋 Good morning! It’s Saturday 27 June 2026. I’m Neil McIntosh, editor of The Early Line, and it’s great to have you here.
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Have a wonderful weekend, all!
☀️ The weekend’s weather: While Glasgow and Inverness will see a mix of sunshine and the occasional shower all weekend, Edinburgh and Aberdeen are expected to be dry. Everywhere will, mercifully, be cooler than in recent days. Not so in London and the south east, which continues to struggle through a ⚠️ weather warning - now downgraded to a (still very serious) amber, for extreme heat. (Here’s the UK forecast).
SIX THINGS TO TALK ABOUT
The e-bike menace | A grim, growing toll in Venezuela | Frying up in a heatwave, Paris-style | Holiday books | Trump’s damp squib fair | A perfect conversion
🍸 Have you nearly been run down by an e-bike yet? I don’t think I can be accused of tabloid hyperbole when I say they’re becoming a menace on our urban streets and - as Stephen Jardine points out in today’s Scotsman - on our cycle paths.
“Over the last couple of years, the city’s cycle paths have become a super highway for electric food delivery bikes,” he writes. “They fly along at breakneck speed without any thought for other users and it’s only going to be a matter of time before someone is seriously hurt.”
Jardine is not wrong: as a frequent (walking) user of those paths, I’ve had plenty of near-run things - and, once, an altercation with a (petrol) motorbike delivery driver who was hurtling his vehicle down a path, illegally.
Alas, it’s not the case that “it’s only going to be a matter of time before someone is seriously hurt”. There are lots of cases now, not necessarily involving delivery bikes, but certainly involving the machines themselves. Bang up-to-date numbers are hard to find, but by mid 2025, Scotland had seen 34 e-bike accidents since 2020, including 15 serious incidents and 1 death. Edinburgh was, by far, the worst off.
More recent incidents include that of Gloria Stephenson, 86, mown down by an ebike user while she crossed a road. Nicky Campbell’s daughter, Lilla, was also badly injured in a hit-and-run earlier this month, in London.
It’s starting to be discussed at City Council level, in Edinburgh at least… but one wonders if stiffer action, at a national level, might be the only effective answer: is it time to enforce licensing, as you would a motorbike?
Upgrade to read the full Party Line, including
A grim, growing toll in Venezuela after those earthquakes
Frying up in a heatwave, Paris-style
Some terrific holiday book recommendations
News of Donald Trump’s damp squib national fair
A really lovely property of the week in southern Scotland
PLUS: find top TV, film and sporting picks for the weekend.
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