Michigan County Roads Are Closed to ORVs Until a Township Votes Them Open

You can ride a gravel county road all afternoon in Roscommon and get a ticket for the same thing one county south. The line that matters isn’t drawn in the dirt. It’s drawn in a meeting room.

A Michigan county road is closed to ORVs the moment it’s built. Nobody has to post a sign to keep you off it. Riding the roadway is off-limits until a local government votes to open it, and there are two doors into that vote. A county board of commissioners can pass an ordinance opening roads across the whole county. Or a single township can pass its own and open just the roads inside its own borders. That second door is why access is such a patchwork: you can cross one township line and go from legal to not, with nothing on the ground to warn you.

The northern counties and the U.P. tend to walk through one of those doors. Down in the southern tier, plenty of boards leave the roads closed, and the ones that do open them have to sit down with the county road commission first before they vote. A road commission can pull roads back off the map too, but not the whole map. State law caps them at closing 30 percent of the county’s road miles, and only to protect the environment or answer a real safety problem.

Where a road is open, the rules are the boring kind that keep you out of trouble. You ride with traffic on the far right of the maintained surface, not the shoulder or the ditch, and you keep it to 25 miles an hour unless a lower ORV limit is posted. Cities and villages are their own animal. A county ordinance doesn’t reach inside them, so a town has to open its own streets separately.

None of this replaces the sticker. Riding eligible roads still takes the $26.25 ORV license from the DNR. The $10 trail permit on top of that is a different thing entirely: it buys you the state-designated trails and scramble areas, not the road. Both run April 1 to March 31, so a license bought in March is a one-week license.

The safe move before a trip is to pull up the specific county’s ORV ordinance and check whether your township is in or out. That five-minute look is cheaper than the ride home in a trailer.