Wisconsin Statutes that Relate to Cycling


Here the Wisconsin state statutes that relate to bicycles in a variety of formats and vintages.

Update, Aug. 2003:
The Department of Transportation's Bicycle Rules are online.
Update, Nov. 2000:
You can search Wisconsin statutes easily with this new form. These will be more up to date than the links below.
If you're traveling, you may alse be in interested in other state laws. These have been helpfully compiled at MassBike .

Unofficial Text from Updated Database of 1995-96 Wisconsin Statutes & Annotations, Updated Through 1997 Wisconsin Act 247
This set of PDF files of Wisconsin statutes comes from the Wisconsin Legislature web page. According to Arthur Ross, Madison's Bicycle-Pedestrian Coordinator, the chapters of most interest to folks looking for bicycle law are these:
340: Vehicles - general provisions (definitions)
346: Rules of the road
347: Equipment of vehicles
349: Vehicles - -powers of state and local authorities
There is also a searchable folio infobase.

Some state and local statutes pertaining to pedestrians
Bicycle and In-Line Skate Laws
WisDOT publishes this summary of the state statutes that apply to bicycles and in-line skates, which we provide here in PDF (six pages) and HTML formats. It's dated 1997, but draws upon a 1995 database.

Wisconsin Statutes that Relate to Cycling (1995)
This was contributed by Joseph King, frequent contributor to the Bicycling Community Page and perlmeister extraordinaire. Unfortunately, it dates back to 1995, which is before the 1996 Bicycle Safety Bill was passed that brought Wisconsin into closer compliance with the Uniform Vehicle Code and therefore changed a variety of the statutes. Joe also warns us that it might not be complete, and there might be the odd bug in, say, the index. It was generated by searching a database of Wisconsin statutes for those that contained the word "bicycle," then processing the output to include hypertext links. Thanks, Joe.

Also, here is a directory of cycling statutes for a growing number of states.


Go to the Bicycling Community Page. webmaster