On July 29, the Bay Harbor Islands Town Council passed Ordinance 1145. It does two things: nobody under 16 can operate an e-scooter, e-bike, or e-motorcycle anywhere in town, and nobody of any age can ride one on a town sidewalk. The official announcement runs two sentences.
The part worth sitting with isn't the age limit. Most parents already treat these as vehicles, not toys, and the 16-year-old threshold just puts a number on an instinct people already had. The sidewalk clause is the one that actually rearranges how people move around a town built on two islands with a short list of streets to begin with. Take the sidewalk away and the ride has to go somewhere. That somewhere is the road, on streets laid out for cars, connecting to a bridge that the town's own paperwork admits was never built with a bike lane.
What Ordinance 1145 Actually Changes
The rule itself is narrow and specific:
- Riders under 16 may not operate e-scooters, e-bikes, or e-motorcycles anywhere within town limits, regardless of where they ride.
- Riders of any age may not use these vehicles on town sidewalks.
Local10 News had reported the proposal back in early June, when the council was still weighing the age cutoff. About two months later, it passed as written. The town's newsflash doesn't spell out a fine schedule, a warning period, or an ID-carry requirement, which is worth flagging on its own. More on that below.
Two Islands, Not Many Streets
Bay Harbor Islands runs its daily life along Kane Concourse, the commercial spine that connects the town's two islands and carries most of the walking and biking traffic between homes, the municipal garage, and the restaurants and offices that line it. Off that spine, the residential streets are narrow, two-lane, and largely without dedicated bike lanes. Families near Ruth K. Broad Bay Harbor K-8 Center already share those same blocks on foot every school morning.
Take sidewalks out of the equation for e-bikes and scooters and there isn't a parallel network to absorb them. Riders share the street with cars, on roads that weren't widened for the purpose, in a town where the whole point of living on the islands is that you can walk or ride most places you need to go.
The One Way Off the Islands Still Has No Bike Lane
The bridge that actually gets residents off the islands is the Shepard Broad Causeway Bridge, a drawbridge connecting the town to North Miami. It opened in 1951, which makes it 75 years old this year, and it doubles as an evacuation route for roughly 40,000 residents across Bay Harbor Islands, Bal Harbour, Surfside, Miami Beach, and Sunny Isles Beach during major storms.
Here's the part that doesn't show up in the ordinance announcement. In the town's own request for state construction funding, officials wrote plainly that the current bridge lacks an ADA-compliant path for pedestrians and cyclists, a gap the same document links directly to accidents and injuries. The eventual fix is a planned 14-foot shared-use path built into the bridge's replacement. That replacement, however, is still moving through a project development and environment study that has already run $5.5 million, and as of the state's 2025-26 budget conference, only $1 million has been secured toward actual construction. No start date has been confirmed.
In the meantime, the existing bridge just came off a four-month repair window that ran from April 1 through August 1. So the timing lands like this: the town just told riders to get off its sidewalks in the same summer that its only bridge off the islands reopened from active construction, with no safe cycling path across it and no funded date for when one arrives.
Not Just a Local Impulse
Bay Harbor Islands isn't writing this rule in isolation. Sunny Isles Beach passed a nearly identical ordinance on July 21, setting the same 16-year-old minimum and the same sidewalk ban, but going further: riders there must carry government-issued ID, and violations carry a $250 fine on the first offense, rising to $500 for repeat violations, with an educational outreach period starting August 16. Coverage of that ordinance tied it directly to Governor DeSantis's veto of a statewide e-bike safety bill, which left individual cities to write their own rules rather than operate under one set of state standards.
That context matters for reading Bay Harbor Islands' version correctly. The town has the age limit and the sidewalk ban, but as of this writing it hasn't published the same enforcement detail Sunny Isles Beach has, no fine amount, no ID requirement, no outreach runway before penalties kick in. Residents here are working from a rule that's real but thinner on the mechanics of what happens if someone breaks it.
What Changes for a Ride Across Kane Concourse This Month
For anyone actually living this out, the practical shift is straightforward. A commute by e-bike from home to dinner on Kane Concourse now happens on the street, not the sidewalk, regardless of how old the rider is. A teenager who's been scootering to a friend's house or to the water can't legally do it at all until they turn 16. And crossing the causeway toward North Miami means sharing a bridge that the town's own funding request admits isn't built for that trip yet.
Two other changes are worth knowing about if you haven't caught them. The town has also swapped its old paper parking hangtags for a digital, license-plate-linked permit system, with permits sold monthly on a first-come basis through an online portal. And on August 17, Bay Harbor Islands is joining Surfside and Bal Harbour for a joint water safety course at the Surfside Community Center, aimed at giving families in all three towns hands-on water safety skills. Neither is connected to Ordinance 1145 directly, but both land in the same stretch of summer, and together they read less like isolated updates and more like a town retooling several systems for managing its limited public space at once.
None of this makes the islands harder to live on. It makes the terms a little more specific than they were a month ago, and that's worth knowing before you're the one figuring it out mid-ride.
For residents who want a standing local resource beyond the town's newsflash page, The Davoudpour Team works and lives alongside Bay Harbor Islands, Bal Harbour, and Surfside every day, which means changes like this one tend to cross our desk early. If a building question, a rental decision, or a future move ever intersects with what's happening on the ground here, Schedule a Consultation and start with someone who already knows these streets.
