The Pittsford Sidewalk Bike Law: What Changes, What Doesn't, and What's Still Undecided

Seven Wheelmen and the Same Argument We Are Having Now

Seven Wheelmen and the Same Argument We Are Having Now

Long before anyone drafted the Pittsford sidewalk bike law now sitting in front of the Board of Trustees, the village had this fight once already. In June of 1894, seven young men were arrested in the Village of Pittsford for riding their bicycles on the sidewalk. They were arraigned before Judge Charles True, pleaded not guilty, hired a lawyer named John N. Steele, and walked out discharged when the jury decided the case had not been made.

Four days later, the Village Board rewrote the ordinance. According to the Town of Pittsford Historian's account, the new rule read:

No person riding a bicycle shall approach within ten feet of a person walking or standing upon a walk.

— Village of Pittsford bicycle ordinance, as amended June 26, 1894

Ten feet, or dismount. That was the compromise a village of horse carts and gas lamps arrived at after arresting seven teenagers.

The draft now in front of the Board asks for fifty.

That is not a gotcha. It is the measure of how much has changed — and almost none of the change is on the sidewalk itself. In 1894 the fastest thing on that walk was a young man on a safety bicycle. Today it can be a machine with a 750-watt motor doing twenty miles an hour without anyone pedaling. But the far bigger change happened on the other side of the curb. The road beside that sidewalk in 1894 was unpaved and full of horses. Today it is a state road moving commuter traffic through the middle of a village. Both sides of the curb got more dangerous. This ordinance governs one of them.

The Village has been working on this since the fall of 2025. It has held a public hearing, tabled the vote, and rewritten the draft at least once. That is not dysfunction. That is a small board taking a hard question seriously. But it does mean that most residents have no clear idea what is actually in the document. So here it is.

What the Pittsford Sidewalk Bike Law Would Actually Change

What the Pittsford Sidewalk Bike Law Would Actually Change

The following excerpts are quoted from the draft local law modifying Chapter 176 of the Code of the Village of Pittsford, dated June 23, 2026, as posted by the Village on its Currently Proposed Local Law page.

Start with the piece that generated the headlines. The draft would write electric bikes and electric scooters into Village code for the first time, and then bar them from sidewalks entirely.

Worth knowing before anyone gets angry about it: this is not the Village inventing a rule. Under state law, e-bikes and e-scooters are already barred from sidewalks statewide. The New York State DMV puts it plainly — you cannot operate these devices on a sidewalk except as authorized by local law or ordinance, and municipalities may further regulate the time, place, and manner of their operation. Silence from Pittsford has been the only thing making it ambiguous. Writing it into Chapter 176 makes it locally enforceable by a local officer rather than a theoretical matter of state law.

The genuinely new material is what applies to ordinary, unpowered bikes — plus skateboards, scooters, and roller skates, which the draft groups together as "non-motorized wheeled devices."

A helmet to ride on the sidewalk. Note that the clause cross-references state law rather than setting its own age threshold, and New York currently requires helmets for riders under fourteen — so how broadly this lands is one of the details still worth asking the Board about. The bell provision is clearer: not merely a duty to call out when passing, but a requirement that you be carrying something capable of making the sound.

There is a small, warm irony here that is easy to miss. After its Bike Safety Jamboree this spring, the Village offered free bike bells to residents under sixteen, while supplies last, at Village Hall. The law and the giveaway are the same idea arriving from two different directions.

Then comes the provision that will surprise people most.

Fifty feet is roughly four car lengths. On the residential streets where riding would still be allowed, it is a workable rule most of the time. It also means that the moment you come within sight of a neighbor on the same block, you are getting off your bike.

And the penalty:

One hundred dollars, with no reduced rate for a first offense, and the possibility that an e-bike is taken. The draft also widens who may enforce it: police, code enforcement, the parking enforcement officer, any member of the Department of Public Works, or anyone else the Board designates.

What Is Not Changing

What Is Not Changing

This is the part that gets lost, and it matters, because a lot of what reads as new has been Village law for years.

Pedestrians already have the right-of-way on Village sidewalks. Riders are already required to give an audible signal before passing someone. Lights or reflective equipment are already required from a half hour after sunset to a half hour before sunrise. All of that sits in the current Chapter 176 today.

The towpath rule is not new either. Riding between the Main Street bridge and the State Street bridge has required dismounting since the Board amended the code in October 2020.

So the honest summary is narrower than the headlines suggested. The draft adds a helmet requirement, a carried-bell requirement, a specific lighting standard, the fifty-foot separation, the dismount districts, and a defined penalty. Everything else is tightening language around rules that already exist.

The national backdrop is real. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that emergency department visits tied to e-bikes, e-scooters, and hoverboards rose from 37,300 in 2017 to 149,100 in 2024, and that e-bike visits alone reached 59,200 in 2024 — thirty-eight percent of the entire eight-year total in a single year. Something genuinely did change, and it changed fast.

The harder question is whether the thing that changed is the sidewalk, or everything around it.

The Streets Changed More Than the Sidewalks Did

The Streets Changed More Than the Sidewalks Did

The sidewalks around Pittsford are roughly the same width they were in 1894. What runs beside it is not remotely the same thing.

When those seven wheelmen were hauled in front of Judge Charles True, Village streets were not yet paved. According to the village history compiled by former Mayor Bob Corby, Pittsford's main streets were not surfaced in brick until 1916, and not paved in asphalt until the 1920s. The traffic was horses, wagons, and carriages moving at a trot. A collision in the road in 1894 was frightening and could badly hurt you. It was not, as a rule, the same category of event as what happens now.

Today three state roads cross this village. That is not a complaint, it is the physical fact Trustee Wilkes named when he asked Albany for bike lanes. The roads through the middle of Pittsford are engineered to move vehicles through it.

Here is what that means in practice, and it is worth saying without softening. In 2023, 1,166 bicyclists were killed in crashes with motor vehicles in the United States, a four percent increase over the 1,117 killed in 2022, with an estimated 49,989 more injured. Cyclist deaths in this country have been at or near record levels. And according to federal crash data, pedestrians, cyclists and other people outside vehicles went from under eighteen percent of American traffic deaths in 2014 to nearly twenty-two percent in 2023 — nonmotorist deaths rose more than fifty percent over that decade, roughly twice the rate of traffic deaths overall.

The mechanism is speed, and the numbers are brutal and well established. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that for a person on foot struck by a car, the average risk of death reaches ten percent at an impact speed of 23 mph, twenty-five percent at 32 mph, and fifty percent at 42 mph.

Those figures are for pedestrians rather than cyclists, and a bicycle changes the geometry of a crash. But the physics underneath does not care much which one you were: a human body outside a vehicle, struck by one, at speed. A carriage horse at a trot did not put anyone on that curve.

This is why "just ride in the street" is not a neutral instruction here, and why the people asking for it are careful about how they say it. Wilkes is right that a well-designed road is a safer place for a bicycle than a crowded sidewalk. That is genuinely what the research shows. The condition doing the work in that sentence is well-designed — and a state road carrying commuter traffic through a village center is not that.

So the village is holding two true things at once. Sidewalks belong to people on foot. And the streets, as currently designed, are a deadly place to put anyone on a bicycle. Neither of those is going to stop being true because an ordinance passes.

That tension is sharpest in one specific place — the few blocks where the draft would not let you ride at all.

Where the Rules Bite Hardest: Main Street and Schoen Place

Where the Rules Bite Hardest: Main Street and Schoen Place

The draft names three zoning districts where you must get off and walk, no exceptions:

Three acronyms, but really two places. VCB is the Village Center Business district — the shops. TDD is an overlay sitting on top of VCB, adding design standards to the same ground. And MU-EC is Mixed Use Erie Canal, the district written to preserve the character of the canal frontage, which is to say Schoen Place and Northfield Common.

Translated out of code: the dismount zone is Main Street and the canal. It is where the ice cream is, where the coffee is, where the boats tie up, and where a nine-year-old is most likely to be riding somewhere on purpose.

That is also, not coincidentally, where nearly everyone is walking.

Here is the complication nobody's messaging fully accounts for. In the CPSC's 2024 follow-up study of e-bike injuries, fifty-eight percent happened on paved roads and nineteen percent on paved sidewalks. Twenty-four percent involved a motor vehicle. The sidewalk is where the pedestrian conflict lives, but the road is where riders are actually getting hurt.

Which raises the question the Village has been circling for nine months: if you move riders off the sidewalk, where exactly are you moving them to?

Why This Is Still Sitting There

Why This Is Still Sitting There

The first version of this law would have banned sidewalk riding for anyone over the age of twelve. It went to a public hearing on February 10, and the Board sat through more than two hours of comment. The age cutoff is gone from the June draft.

Trustee David Wilkes, who introduced the bill, is a road cyclist of long standing, and has been consistent about what he thinks the law is for. Speaking to WHEC in March, he described the arrival of e-bikes and e-scooters capable of twenty-plus miles an hour, and what happens when one of them meets a person on foot. In the same interview he made a direct appeal to the state: the Village would love bike lanes on the three state roads that cross it, and would love the funding to build them.

Mayor Alysa Plummer told WROC in February that she has been struck twice by bicycles while on a Village sidewalk, and described a conceptual design for bike boulevards on the side streets the Village actually owns — safer, she said, than the county and state roads running through the middle of town.

Read those two together and the shape of the problem is clear. Nobody on the Board is anti-bicycle. The people pushing hardest for this law are cyclists. What they are describing is a village whose main streets belong to the State of New York, whose sidewalks are the only comfortable place left to ride, and whose pedestrians are paying for that arrangement.

The Board tabled the vote rather than pass it, and five months later the revised draft is still sitting on the Village's proposed-law page. That is worth reading generously. They declined to pass something they were not finished thinking about.

The Other Half of the Answer

The Other Half of the Answer

On Tuesday, July 28, the Board of Trustees takes up an agenda item titled "Traffic Calming and Bike Boulevards." The packet behind it is not new material — it is three pages lifted from the Village's own Comprehensive Plan, under the heading "Network of Walkable, Connected Neighborhoods & Streets."

Those pages commit the Village, on paper, to creating a bike master plan, to enforcing its Complete Streets policy through the code and development review, to increasing crosswalk visibility, to restructuring the North Main Street bridge lanes for pedestrian safety, and to adding crosswalks where connectivity is missing. Some of those items are marked as zero-to-two-year actions. The plan was adopted in 2019.

One more number from the CPSC study, because it belongs to both halves of this conversation: fifteen percent of e-bike-related emergency visits in 2024 were people who were struck by one. Not riders. Bystanders. That is the pedestrian case, and it is not imaginary.

But the rest of that chart is riders. Which is the whole argument in one image — this is not bikes versus people. It is a village with nowhere good to put a bicycle, trying to solve it one ordinance at a time.

The sidewalk law and the bike boulevards are not competing proposals. They are two halves of the same answer, and only one of them has been moving.

How to Weigh In

How to Weigh In

As of this writing, the Village's upcoming public hearings page lists nothing for the current draft. The law sits on the Village's Currently Proposed Local Law page, revised and waiting. The 2026 enacted local laws list contains exactly one entry, and this is not it.

Tuesday's workshop is open. The Board of Trustees meets July 28 at Village Hall, 21 North Main Street, with the bill payment meeting at noon and the workshop following at 12:15. Meetings are streamed, and the Village posts the videoconference link with each agenda. Written comment goes to the Village Clerk at villageclerk@villageofpittsfordny.gov, or you can walk it into Village Hall.

If you want to read the thing yourself rather than take my summary of it, the draft is posted and it is five pages. That is a twenty-minute investment in a rule you will live under.

What would it take for you to feel safe letting your kid ride to Schoen Place on the street?

That is the actual question underneath all of this, and the answer to it is not written in Chapter 176. It is written in curb lines, crosswalk paint, bump-outs, and speed. The 1894 board could only argue about how far a bicycle should stay from a pedestrian, because in 1894 the road was the only other option and it was full of horses. We have more choices than they did. What we have not yet done is make them.