Q: Can ATVs be legally driven on city neighborhood lots in Bellingham? Are they legal on city streets?
A: This feels like one of those questions. You know, the ones where the outcome determines your next conversation with your neighbors. I see two possibilities here. Either your neighbor is riding their ATV and you want them to stop, or your neighbor asked you to stop riding your ATV but you don’t want to stop.
This should be a simple answer, right? Either you can ride it or you can’t. It’s not so easy. Actually, if we limit the answer to neighborhood zoning in Bellingham the answer is simple. Answer to the first question: maybe (and not very helpful). Second answer: no. But it’s getting to those answers that’s the hard part, especially if we want to be inclusive no matter where you live in Washington.
The law regarding ATVs on public roads begins with: “A person may operate a wheeled all-terrain vehicle upon any public road in this state . . .” But as you know if you regularly read this column, it’s the exceptions that really make the law. That introductory statement is followed by paragraphs of restrictions that take what seemed like broad permission and reduce it to a much smaller set of roads available for ATVs.
There are a lot of restrictions, and the restrictions have exceptions, and the exceptions to the restrictions have exceptions. It can get kind confusing, so I’ll highlight the major ones here:
- Vehicle must be registered with the Department of Licensing for on-road use
- Operator must have a driver license
- Can’t be ridden on state highways (with the exception of portions of the highway within a city’s limits and with a speed limit of 35 mph or less, but only if the city has an ordinance allowing it.) This is one of those restrictions with an exception with a restriction.
- Can’t be ridden on roads with a speed limit greater than 35 mph (except for crossing streets with a speed limit of no more than 60 mph, but only if the roads intersect at 90 degrees, unless that crossing is prohibited by ordinance.) And here we have a restriction with an exception, with another restriction, completed by an additional restriction.
- Can’t be ridden in a county with a population of 15,000 or more (unless that county has an ordinance allowing ATVs on public roads)
- Can’t be ridden in a city (unless the city has an ordinance allowing ATVs on public roads)
- Can’t be ridden on roads that are excluded by an ordinance
As you can see, you have to work through some things to get a yes or no answer. If you’re wondering about riding your ATV on public roads the best place to start is the city or county website where you want to ride. The law requires jurisdictions with ATV rules to make them accessible from the main page of their website. If you don’t find anything on the website of your city or county, most likely you’re not allowed to ride your ATV there.
For those of you who find this admittedly incomplete answer unsatisfying, so do I. So I made a flowchart. Here’s the path to determining if you can ride your ATV on the road:
Once the ATV is on private property it’s a different set of rules. Other than a few exceptions for serious crimes and some very limited private roadway scenarios, traffic law applies exclusively to public roads. That’s not to say you can do anything you want with your ATV on private property. Assuming that the ATV riders aren’t putting anyone in immediate danger riding on their city lot, the likely path to violating the law might be through codes about public disturbance and noise.
While each jurisdiction can write their own public disturbance code, many include a section about frequent, repetitive or continuous sounds of any motor vehicle within a residentially zoned area, “so as to unreasonably disturb or interfere with the peace, comfort and repose of others.”
Whether or not operating an ATV on a city lot is a violation depends on how you interpret “unreasonably disturb.” If it’s operating during times when people would likely be asleep, running without a muffler or spitting dirt and rocks into the neighbor’s yard and windows I think that could qualify. But I can imagine a scenario where the use isn’t considered unreasonably disturbing too. That’s why I’m settling on a “maybe” for this answer and deferring to the police (if it comes to that) to sort it out.