Can You Ride E-Bikes on Cherry Hills Village Trails?

City Hall put out a new resource page in June explaining, in plain language, why the electric two-wheeler in your garage might legally be a motorcycle. It's a genuinely useful page. It walks through Colorado's e-bike classes, explains why an e-moto or electric dirt bike can trigger licensing, registration, and insurance requirements the same as a Harley, and warns that a machine bought as a weekend toy can turn into a citation or an impound if you ride it in the wrong place. The city says it plainly: it's not a toy, it's a motorcycle.

That page answers what your machine is. It does not answer the question that actually shows up, again and again, in the minutes of the Village's own Parks, Trails and Recreation Commission: can I ride this thing on the trail behind my house. And on that question, the record is more complicated than a classification chart, because Cherry Hills Village's trails were never built to be neutral ground for whatever rolls on two wheels. They were built for horses.

What the new page actually settles

The city's E-Bikes and E-Motos page, updated June 25, 2026, exists because the line between a bicycle and a motor vehicle has gotten blurry enough to cause real problems for families. A few things it clears up:

• Colorado splits e-bikes into three classes based on how they assist a rider, and those classes carry different rules for where they can go.
• Electric dirt bikes and electric motorcycles are not e-bikes. Under state law they can be classified as motor vehicles, which means the same licensing, registration, and insurance requirements as a gas-powered motorcycle.
• Buying one without checking the classification first is how families end up with a vehicle that can't legally go where they planned to ride it.

The Cherry Hills Village Police Department has been making the same point since at least last summer, when it posted a flyer reminding residents that e-bikes fall into three classes, each with its own rules, and that more powerful rides need a motorcycle endorsement. The June page is the more thorough version of that same warning, built for anyone about to click "buy" on something that looks like a bicycle but might not act like one.

None of it, though, tells you what happens once the bike is in your driveway and the bridle trail is thirty feet away.

The trail question the page skips

Cherry Hills Village's trail network is not a modern greenway. It grew out of easements set aside when the Village incorporated, cleared and fenced one section at a time by residents who wanted a place to keep riding as the open land around them filled in with houses. Two of those residents, Al Saterdal and Ed Wasson, are credited with organizing the effort and forming the Cherry Hills Park & Trail Association, whose stated purpose was to maintain a trail system for pedestrian, horseback, and bicycle use. By the time that history was written up, the Village had roughly 15 miles of bridle trails, most of them feeding into the High Line Canal.

Here's the part that matters for anyone with an e-bike: those trails aren't just informally horse-friendly. Cherry Hills Village has no public parks in the conventional sense. Instead, by ordinance, the bridle trails themselves are classified as parks, which is the legal mechanism that lets the city spend tax dollars maintaining them. That same ordinance is what has kept motorized vehicles off the trails for decades. A trail system built and legally defined around horses and foot traffic was never written with electric assist in mind, and the city has not gone back to rewrite it.

What the commission actually said about it, on the record

This isn't theoretical. At the Parks, Trails and Recreation Commission's March 12, 2026 meeting, staff addressed the e-bike question directly. According to the minutes, the manager explained that current code does not allow e-bikes unless they are being used as a mobility device, and acknowledged enforcement challenges the city faces in actually applying that rule.

The rest of the meeting reads like a snapshot of a small city working through a problem it hasn't solved. Commissioner Greer raised a separate but related issue: whether trails that run along the shoulders of roads like Quincy Avenue and Holly Street need better delineation to keep cars off them, a conversation that also touched on the crosswalk safety of High Line Canal crossings at Quincy and Colorado Boulevard. Staff noted those crossings are a known problem, that six tubular markers have gone in as a stopgap, and that a full overpass near University and St. Mary's Academy has been studied in the past but rejected as too expensive. Recent High Line Canal overpasses have run about $8 million each, staff said, which gives some sense of how seriously the city weighs trail infrastructure even when the fix in question has nothing to do with e-bikes.

The resident survey attached to that same meeting is where the tension shows up most plainly. One comment flagged it directly: "One issue that is getting worse - e-bikes on trails." Another took the enforcement gap to its logical conclusion, arguing that if the city isn't going to enforce the existing rules, "it may make sense to consider removing the signs" that state them. That's not a fringe complaint. It's a resident pointing out, correctly, that a rule nobody enforces isn't really a rule, and asking the city to either commit to policing it or stop pretending it does.

So where does that leave you if you already own one

None of this is legal advice, and rules can shift as the city works through this. But based on what's actually on the public record as of this summer, here's the practical read:

1. On Village streets, an e-bike generally follows the same rules as a traditional bicycle, and an e-moto or electric dirt bike may need registration and a motorcycle endorsement depending on its classification, per the city's own page.
2. On the Village's bridle trails, current code does not allow e-bikes unless the rider is using the device as a mobility aid, according to what staff told the Parks, Trails and Recreation Commission in March.
3. On the High Line Canal Trail itself, which runs through multiple jurisdictions beyond just Cherry Hills Village, expect additional signage and rules that don't originate with the city alone.

The gap between "not currently enforced" and "allowed" is exactly where a lot of Village families are going to find themselves this year, especially with school starting soon and more kids commuting to Kent Denver or Cherry Hills Elementary on two wheels instead of in the back seat.

Why this fits the place it's happening in

Cherry Hills Village has always treated its trail network as something closer to infrastructure than amenity, which is part of what makes the Village feel the way it does. The Cherry Hills Land Preserve exists for the same reason the bridle trails were fenced off one easement at a time: residents here have consistently chosen to protect open, quiet, horse-and-foot-traffic corridors even as the value of the land around them climbed. An e-bike isn't a threat to that character, but it is a genuinely new kind of user on a trail system that was designed, legally and physically, around a much older one.

If you're weighing a purchase for your kids or your own weekend rides, the honest answer is that the city is still figuring this out in real time, and the record shows it. Check the current resource page before you buy, and don't assume the trail behind your house works the same way the street in front of it does.

If you're curious about more of what's actually changing in the Village this year, from trail policy to what's happening along Quincy Avenue, take a look at our Cherry Hills Village neighborhood page, and reach out any time you'd like a local read on what's really going on here. That's what Makin' Moves with Georgia is here for, whether or not you're anywhere near ready to buy or sell.