Arkansas Golf Carts Are Street-Legal Only Where a City or County Has Passed an Ordinance

Two short sections carry the whole Arkansas scheme, and they are not in the traffic title at all. Both sit in Title 14, Local Government, because the General Assembly delegated the decision rather than making it. A.C.A. § 14-54-1410 is in the municipal powers chapter and A.C.A. § 14-16-118 is in the county powers chapter, and each simply hands the local body a switch it may or may not throw.

On the city side, § 14-54-1410(a) makes it "within the municipal affairs and authority" of any Arkansas municipality to authorise, by ordinance, any owner of a golf cart to operate it upon the city streets. The delegation stops at three kinds of street: authorisation may not extend to a city street that is also designated as a federal highway, as a state highway, or as a county road. Subsection (c) defines "municipality" for this purpose as any city of the first class, city of the second class, or incorporated town, which covers every incorporated place in Arkansas but not unincorporated communities, which have no municipal government to pass the ordinance.

Subsection (b) is the part riders care about. Where the municipality has authorised operation and the driver stays within the circumstances and provisions of the section, "there shall be no motor vehicle registration or license necessary to operate the golf cart on the public street". Arkansas therefore does not title, register, plate or insure golf carts as a class, and does not require a driver license for the operator on an authorised street. The trade is that the cart is lawful only inside the ordinance a city chose to pass.

The section was originally Act 976 of 1993, and as enacted it was much tighter: the 1993 text let a municipality authorise golf carts "only from the owner's place of residence to the golf course and to return from the golf course to the owner's residence". Act 170 of 2013 struck that sentence out entirely, which is what turned the Arkansas provision from a golf-course-access rule into a general local-option rule.

Counties waited another eight years. A.C.A. § 14-16-118 was created by Act 188 of 2021 and lets a county authorise golf cart operation by ordinance on the roads of the county unless the road is a city street, a federal highway or a state highway, and provides that unless the ordinance itself requires one, no registration or licence is needed. The act carried an emergency clause stating in terms that "it is currently illegal for golf carts to be operated on county roads", which is the clearest possible confirmation that before 2021 there was no county route at all.

There is one further state-level allowance, and it is narrow. A.C.A. § 22-4-113 lets a person who holds a disability document and a valid driver's license operate an all-terrain vehicle or a golf cart on roads within developed recreation use areas of a state park, but not from one recreation-use area to another, and requires proper lights when operating from one-half hour after sunset.

On low-speed vehicles Arkansas is a genuine blank. The phrase "low-speed vehicle" appears in only four sections of the entire Arkansas Code, and none of them creates a registration class or an operating right. A.C.A. § 27-14-614(a)(3) defines a low-speed vehicle as a four-wheeled vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating of less than three thousand pounds and a maximum speed capability of thirty-five miles per hour on a paved level surface, and it does so purely to exclude such vehicles from the electric and hybrid vehicle registration surcharge. The other three uses are in the motor vehicle dealer licensing chapter, §§ 23-112-103, 23-112-302 and 23-112-802. There is no Arkansas equivalent of a neighborhood electric vehicle plan or an LSV plate.

Golf carts are also expressly written out of the off-road categories. A.C.A. § 27-21-102 excludes a golf cart from the definitions of all-terrain vehicle, recreational off-highway vehicle and utility task vehicle, so the ATV rules in Chapter 21 do not supply a fallback route onto the road.

Because the authorisation is an ordinance, the enforcement is local. Driving a golf cart on a city street in a town that has never passed a § 14-54-1410 ordinance, or on a county road in a county that has not passed a § 14-16-118 ordinance, means operating an unregistered motor vehicle on a public way, and Act 188 of 2021 described that pre-ordinance state of affairs as "currently illegal" in its own emergency clause. Crossing onto a federal or state highway is outside what either section permits a local body to authorise, so no ordinance can cure it, and a city ordinance cannot reach a street that is also designated a county road. Where an ordinance does exist, its own terms carry the penalty, and a county ordinance may under § 14-16-118(b) impose a registration or licence requirement that the statute otherwise waives, so the local text is worth reading before assuming the state default applies.