Barrington Police to Enforce E-Bike Ban at Shaw's Plaza

Barrington's police department will start enforcing something that isn't, strictly speaking, a Rhode Island traffic law: a private property owner's ban on electric bikes and electric scooters at the Barrington Shopping Center on County Road, where new signs now read, in flat language that leaves nothing to interpretation, "No riding of e-scooters or e-bikes allowed on property. Trespassers will be prosecuted."

The department put out a community notice on Wednesday spelling out how it intends to handle riders who show up anyway. The model is the same one Chief Michael Correia rolled out in July 2025 for e-bike violations generally, and it works in two steps: a documented warning for a first violation, then a citation for a second or subsequent one, adjudicated in the RI Traffic Tribunal, RI Family Court, or the Barrington Juvenile Hearing Board depending on the rider's age and the offense. Officers keep discretion. Correia has said crashes, unruly violators, or people who won't cooperate can draw a citation on the first encounter — no warning, no second chance.

"This is a serious public health issue," Correia said in the release.

The numbers he's leaning on come from Brown Health, and they are the sharpest thing in this story. In all of 2025, the Hasbro Children's Hospital emergency department logged 85 visits for e-bike and e-scooter injuries. In the first seven months of 2026 alone, there have already been 143. Brown Health also reports that the severity of injuries from e-bike and e-scooter crashes is far greater than from standard pedal bikes, pointing to head injuries where helmets were absent or the wrong type, more fractures generally, and — this is the detail that should stop a parent mid-sentence — liver and spleen injuries from higher-speed impacts. More riders on the road means more exposure, and some of that increase is arithmetic rather than recklessness; the severity finding is not.

Two incidents at the shopping center itself sit behind the signage. On Monday, April 27, at 5:08 p.m., officers responded to a report of several juveniles on scooters and e-bikes; two 15-year-old Riverside boys were charged with traffic violations including operating an unregistered motorcycle, motorized bicycle, operating a motor vehicle on a bicycle lane or path, and operating without a license, and both were given RI Family Court dates. Then on Tuesday, June 30, around 5 p.m., a 15-year-old Barrington boy riding an electric scooter the wrong way through the parking lot struck the right rear quarter of a mini-van driven by a 21-year-old Barrington woman. He was wearing a helmet. He went to the hospital anyway.

The distinction worth keeping straight — and it's the one most likely to get muddled at the checkout line while you're deciding between rigatoni and ziti at the Shaw's that anchors the plaza — is that the shopping center is private property. State law governs the public road: under RI General Laws sections 31-3-2.2 and 31-19.7-1, nobody under 16 may operate an electric bicycle regardless of class, and every rider and passenger under 21 must wear a helmet on roads, paths, parks, and school property. The parking lot ban is the owner's rule, backed by trespass language, and it applies to riders of any age, compliant equipment or not. What "prosecuted" means in practice — an order to leave, or an actual trespass charge — the notice does not say.

Correia is not a rookie at this. He came to Barrington as chief in June 2021 after 34 years with the Providence Police Department, he leads a 27-officer department serving roughly 17,200 residents, and he has taken the education half of this seriously, teaching a bike safety clinic to campers last August. He told the Town Council in October 2025 that officers had issued nine documented warnings since mid-July of that year, most of them to juveniles. That is not a dragnet. It is a chief building a paper trail he can point to the first time a warned rider comes back.

There is a gap in the state's framework he has flagged repeatedly: the law on e-scooters is nowhere near as clear as the law on e-bikes, which is why his message to parents has been to treat the two the same and apply the same caution. Until the General Assembly closes that gap, the enforcement backstop at 180 County Road is a No Trespassing sign.