Mackinac Island banned cars in 1898 and has stayed banned. In summer, ferries run every twenty minutes. In winter, when the lake freezes solid, residents mark a snowmobile path across the ice with discarded Christmas trees. Some years it doesn't freeze.
A Pirep featured story · KMCD Mackinac Island, Mackinac Island, MI
In the summer of 1898, after the first motor cars appeared on the island and made an unwelcome impression — startling horses and antagonizing the carriage trade — the village council of Mackinac Island voted to ban automobiles. The measure passed on July 6. The island has been car-free ever since. The only state highway in America where motor vehicles are not allowed — M-185, eight miles around the perimeter — runs past Arch Rock and the Grand Hotel's 660-foot porch. Locals get around by bicycle, horse-drawn carriage, and on foot.
The island is small: 4.35 square miles, about five hundred year-round residents, more than a million visitors each summer. It sits in Lake Huron at the eastern end of the Straits of Mackinac. From the mainland it is reached one of three ways: by ferry in summer, by snowmobile across an ice bridge in winter, or by airplane.
Mackinac Island Airport is a 3,500-foot paved runway on the high ground in the middle of the island, owned by the State Parks Commission. There is no fuel service, no air traffic control, no FBO. From late December to early April it is often the only way on or off.
The ice is rarely cooperative. In a hard winter the lake freezes solid enough that islanders lay out a path across the four miles of water between the island and St. Ignace on the Upper Peninsula. They mark the trail with discarded Christmas trees stuck into the ice every few hundred yards, and they cross by snowmobile. In a mild winter the lake freezes only partially — too solid for the ferries to push through, too thin for the snowmobiles. In those weeks every gallon of milk, every prescription, every school sports team going to a basketball game in St. Ignace, comes in or out by airplane.
The local air taxi flies the six-minute hop from the mainland in small Cessnas and Pipers. At the island end, the cargo is unloaded by hand and reloaded into sleighs towed by snowmobiles or onto drays — horse-drawn flatbed wagons. The Christmas trees, the airplanes, and the drays are all part of the same answer to the same question: how do you get groceries to people who decided in 1898 that they did not want cars.