FARMINGTON — Farmington police have spent the late summer riding bicycles from the high school into Unionville, stopping juveniles on e-bikes and electric dirt bikes, issuing warnings and calling parents. Town Manager Kathleen Blonski laid the effort out for the Town Council on September 8. Council member Patti Boye-Williams, who told the room she sees kids on e-bikes in her neighborhood all the time, named the obstacle.
"My concern is parents who think they already know the rules and don't know the rules," she said.
Connecticut's e-bike rules are almost a year old and they are stricter than the ones covering an ordinary bicycle. On a regular bike, a child riding without a helmet is not committing an offense at all; the statute says so outright, and the most an officer may do is warn the parent. On an e-bike, riding without one is an infraction, and it applies to everybody.
What has been illegal since last October
Public Act 25-159 took effect on October 1, 2025. It made three things an infraction:
- Riding an e-bike, or sitting on one as a passenger, without protective headgear. The statute says "no person," with no age attached. The helmet has to meet one of four standards: ANSI, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, ASTM or Snell. An ordinary certified bike helmet qualifies.
- Riding a Class 3 e-bike under the age of 16. A rider under 16 may still sit as a passenger on one, if the bike was built to carry a passenger.
- Riding an e-bike anywhere e-bikes are prohibited.
The classes are worth knowing, because the rules turn on them and the names give nothing away. State law defines a Class 1 e-bike as pedal assist that cuts out at 20 miles per hour, a Class 2 as one whose motor can propel the bike on its own, a throttle, cutting out at 20, and a Class 3 as pedal assist that keeps helping all the way to 28.
Class 3 is the fast one, and it is the one the state singled out. No rider under 16. Not permitted on any bicycle or multi-use trail or path in Connecticut.
The same act went after the machines. Sellers may not represent a vehicle as an e-bike if it does not meet the definition, and have to tell a buyer the vehicle's likely legal classification. Anyone who modifies a bike to change its speed has to change the label. A bike reconfigured to exceed the definition, including with a phone app, is not an e-bike.
On the electric dirt bikes, state law is blunt: an electric bicycle "does not include a dirt bike or an all-terrain vehicle." A machine that is not a legal e-bike is generally a motor-driven cycle, regulated much closer to a car than to a bicycle.
The decision the state left to Farmington
There is one rule the legislature deliberately did not make, and handed to towns instead.
Class 1 e-bikes are broadly allowed on bicycle and multi-use trails unless a local ordinance says otherwise. That is Farmington's call, and Farmington has not made it.
The town's own Bicycle and Trails Advisory Committee has been working the problem since at least December, when it discussed a 15 mile-per-hour trail limit and a prototype ordinance, members candid that enforcement would be thin and a posted rule would function mostly as a signal. In April, a committee member raised what he called the e-moto problem: machines that look like e-bikes, ride like motorcycles, and fit neatly into neither category.
In May, the committee returned to a long-sought bike trail along the Route 4 jug handle three days after a 13-year-old riding a Class 3 e-bike was seriously injured at Farmington Avenue and the Interstate 84 off-ramp, struck by a car around 9 p.m. He was expected to recover.
Blonski told the council the town knows it has the authority and is choosing to wait.
"The town can do various regulations. We can create an ordinance," she said. "But I think we want to make sure that we're making ordinances when we're talking to the school. We want to see how this is all kind of working itself out."
She also said the town is researching whether it can require e-bikes to be registered, and was careful to add that nobody has decided to.
What October 1 actually changes
Describing the enforcement push, Blonski told the council: "New laws, I think, are going into effect October 1st."
Something does take effect October 1. It is not a crackdown. Public Act 26-24, the motor vehicle bill Governor Ned Lamont signed in May, changes the definition of an electric bicycle by a phrase: a bike qualified with a motor of fewer than 750 watts, and from October 1 it qualifies at not more than 750. The act also lifts the weight ceiling on electric scooters and strikes a horsepower limit from another definition.
Across its 64 pages, the act does not use the word helmet, does not set an age for any rider, and says nothing about where anyone may ride. The rules the officers in Unionville are enforcing are the 2025 ones.
What to know
- A helmet is required on an e-bike at every age, rider or passenger. Any certified bike helmet does it.
- No one under 16 may ride a Class 3, the pedal-assist bike that runs to 28 miles per hour.
- Class 3 e-bikes are barred from every bicycle and multi-use trail in Connecticut.
- A dirt bike is not an e-bike, and neither is a bike modified to beat the limits.
- Trail rules for Class 1 are Farmington's to write. So far the town has not written them.
Blonski asked the council to concur with one thing, and it did: the police department, with the Bicycle and Trails Advisory Committee, will hold a public meeting on e-bike and dirt bike rules, and the police chief will ask the superintendent whether the schools want a part in it. Late September or October, no date yet.
Which leaves the fall roughly where the spring left it, except that the officers are now on bicycles. 🏛️
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air, which is their way of saying the temperature and humidity are held at museum conditions. Somewhere in town is a garage holding a bicycle that stopped being a bicycle the day somebody changed a setting on it. Farmington Storage does not ask what you are keeping. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington long enough to know that "new laws take effect October 1" is a sentence worth twenty minutes with the statute. He is on his fourth coffee and can now recite the difference between a Class 2 and a Class 3. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the law that arrived a year ago, the committee that has been drafting an ordinance since December, the public meeting with no date on it yet. We publish slowly and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news" and we mean it, because by the time you read this somebody has opened the public act. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰