Here’s an interesting bulk trucking cat-and-mouse game coming from Malaysia; the Malaysia version of the DOT had set up a checkpoint on one of the main roads going into Singapore in its Malaysian sister city Johor Baru, or JB as the locals call it. JB has grown to become Malaysia’s second largest city and is a key manufacturing hub; it’s become intertwined with Singapore not unlike the relationship between Windsor and Detroit over the US-Canadian border.
Trucks hauling construction material into Singapore caught wind of the checkpoint and pulled over to the side of the road; if they were overloaded, they could be hit with a year in jail and a $2900 fine; justice is a bit rougher in Malaysia, for I can’t think of overloads getting someone arrested in the US. By pulling off the road, the police could only hit them with a $90 ticket for traffic obstruction, since they had no good way to figure out whether the freight carrier was overweight or not.
Overloaded truckers in the US have been known to engage in coop-dodging, where they’ll exit just before a weigh station, go overland for a bit, then get back on the freeway after the station. Here, the truck drivers merely had to play possum until the coop-equivalent shut down, then continue trucking loads of gravel and other items into Singapore.
Finding loopholes in rules is as old as anything, and knows no borders; in fact, the more authoritarian a country is, the more people are forced to game the loopholes.
http://motoring.asiaone.com/Motoring/News/…209-197579.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johor_Bahru
http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/currencie…currencies.html