When a Michigan Golf Cart Can Legally Take the Street

Two towns can sit ten minutes apart on the same lake, and in one it’s perfectly fine to run your golf cart down to the post office while in the other it’ll get you a ticket. Nothing about the carts is different. What’s different is whether the local government bothered to vote.

Golf carts are not street-legal in Michigan on their own. A village, city, or township has to opt in — passing a formal resolution that says, in effect, yes, our streets. And only smaller places can even do it: the population has to be under 30,000 by the 2010 census. That census year is baked into the law, so it won’t quietly slide as a town grows. (Lansing has floated raising the cap to 65,000, but as of mid-2026 that’s still just a bill, not the rule.)

Once a town opts in, the fine print is real. The driver has to be at least 16 and actually licensed to drive a car — a golf cart is not the loophole a 14-year-old dreams of. You can only run it on streets posted 30 mph or slower, and the cart itself can’t exceed 15 mph. Daytime only: nothing from a half hour before sunset to a half hour after sunrise, headlights or no headlights.

State trunk lines — the M-, US-, and I-routes — are their own animal. You can cross one, taking the most direct line across, but you can’t drive along it. Getting a cart onto a trunk line at all takes a whole separate step: the town has to ask the Michigan Department of Transportation for permission and then pass an actual ordinance. Most don’t bother, which is why in a place like Suttons Bay a cart legally hops across M-22 but never rolls down it.

So the honest answer to “can I drive my cart into town” is: it depends on your town clerk, not on state law. If you’re eyeing a place partly because you pictured puttering to the marina in a golf cart, that’s a five-minute phone call to the local office worth making before you fall in love with the driveway.