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Straits Times
27-05-2025
- Automotive
- Straits Times
Speed limiters for heavy vehicles offer chance for ‘mindset change'
SINGAPORE – Lucky Joint Construction (LJC) has enjoyed savings on fuel and maintenance costs since installing speed limiters on most of its heavy vehicles. That is on top of the devices' main benefit – preventing speeding. Mr Calvin Yeow, chief executive of LJC, a telecommunication infrastructure provider, said: 'We do believe that with the enhancement of these speed limiters, they can actually ensure real-time prevention (against speeding).' He was speaking at an event on May 27 where the media got to see the speed limiter up close for the first time since the device – roughly twice the size of a wallet – was made mandatory for heavy vehicles in Singapore. When a driver of a vehicle fitted with a speed limiter tries to rev beyond 60kmh, the engine does not respond – the vehicle maintains a speed of 60kmh. Since January 2024 , companies with heavy vehicles with a maximum laden weight of between 3,501kg and 12,000kg began installing speed limiters. Vehicle owners have been given two to three years to install the device. From Jan 1, 2026, newly imported vehicles of that capacity must be equipped with speed limiters in order to be approved for use in Singapore. As at the end of 2024, around 50 lorries which are required to install the speed limiters have done so, said Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam in a written Parliamentary reply on Jan 7 . About 17,000 eligible lorries are required to install the mandatory speed limiters. 'Speed limiters are really going to help drivers plan their journey,' said Mr Tony Lugg, chief executive of Project Argus, which brings in the AutoKontrol speed limiter showcased at the media event. 'They should slow them down, so they have more time to make decisions before they encounter an incident, as well as (save on) the wear and tear factors on the vehicle and, obviously, overall fuel savings.' Mr Lugg told the media that speed limiters offer a mindset change and a calming effect for heavy vehicle drivers – drivers would be forced to readjust their driving style, rather than driving too fast. But Mr Moses Lim, a director of NLT Vehicle Service, which installs speed limiters, said some heavy vehicle companies appear to be holding back on the installation of the devices. 'We always have this pool of companies that will just sit back and look at how others are doing,' said Mr Lim when describing the slow take-up rate of speed limiters. About 17,000 eligible lorries are required to install the mandatory speed limiters. ST PHOTO: NG SOR LUAN Mr Yeow said companies should not delay in getting speed limiters installed. 'If you... have the 'wait-and-see' approach, it'll be like a VEP (Malaysia's Vehicle Entry Permit) rush. You won't have time to do your operational planning,' he added. LJC started installing speed limiters in its heavy vehicles in March , providing another preventive measure against speeding in addition to other initiatives the company has implemented, such as a network operations centre. LJC's senior manager Jeyaraj Jenkin said speed limiters have helped his company save on fuel bills and vehicle maintenance for 67 of its 79 heavy vehicles installed with the device, which costs about $900 each. LJC's senior manager Jeyaraj Jenkin said speed limiters have helped his company save on fuel bills and vehicle maintenance. ST PHOTO: NG SOR LUAN He added: 'In the past two years, I could see there were no speed-related accidents (with vehicles fitted with speed limiters and other internal preventive measures).' Emphasising the importance of installing speed limiters, a police spokesman at the event said 'there are still heavy vehicle drivers always in a hurry'. On Jan 21 , two people were killed in a morning accident on the Bukit Timah Expressway involving a lorry. The aftermath of the accident showed a stationary white lorry on the first lane of the expressway with a motorcycle near its rear. On March 24 , a 27-year-old motorcyclist died after he was involved in a collision with a lorry on the Seletar Expressway. In May , a total of 81 errant drivers of heavy vehicles were issued summonses following a three-day islandwide enforcement blitz, for offences such as speeding, using a mobile communication device while driving, failing to keep left and failing to visibly display a speed limiter label. Project Argus said the AutoKontrol speed limiter takes around 30 minutes to install and is sealed and tamper-proof. When there are signs of tampering during an annual inspection, the installer will inform the police. During the installation of the speed limiter, which comes with a three-year warranty, the vehicle will be road-tested and its speed calibrated. Installation can be done wherever the vehicles are located. The Traffic Police will be reviewing laws to strengthen deterrence against speed limiter offences such as tampering and non-compliant speed limiters, and against unauthorised speed limiter works. More details will be announced later. Zaihan Mohamed Yusof is senior crime correspondent at The Straits Times. Join ST's WhatsApp Channel and get the latest news and must-reads.
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Cases That Could Stop Trump's Tariffs
House Speaker Mike Johnson made his position on tariff authority clear earlier this month when asked whether Congress would reassert its constitutional power on import levies: 'I think you've got to give the president the latitude, the runway to do what he is elected to do.' Two days later, President Donald Trump instituted a 90-day pause on some of the 'Liberation Day' tariffs he announced April 2, causing chaos in U.S. and global financial markets, but he left in place a universal 10 percent duty on imports and raised tariffs on American imports of most Chinese goods to 145 percent. To make his stance even clearer, Johnson subsequently inserted a procedural measure as part of the budget reconciliation rules that would forestall a congressional challenge to the tariffs for months. With House leadership running interference to abet the surrender of its members' own tariff authority, global trade and markets remain at the mercy of Trump's whims. But two new lawsuits filed last week are asking the courts to enjoin the president's tariff regime, offering a potential path to halt the duties on an expedited timeline. The Liberty Justice Center (LJC), a public interest law firm, filed a lawsuit April 14 on behalf of five businesses alleging the tariffs are unconstitutional. The state of California weighed in with its own suit filed Wednesday, mounting a similar challenge. The cases follow a lawsuit filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a nonprofit legal advocacy group supported by Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo, earlier this month on behalf of a Florida stationery company and a separate suit filed by members of the Blackfeet Nation tribe, including one plaintiff who is a Democratic member of the Montana Senate. The former challenges the administration's first batch of tariffs targeting imports from China; the latter targets the duties on Canadian goods. All the suits argue that the tariffs, which were levied citing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), grossly exceed the president's authority under the law—IEEPA does not mention tariffs nor has it ever been used before to impose such duties. The LJC and California suits both challenge the broader 'Liberation Day' measures—the California suit also covers the China, Canada, and Mexico tariffs. As The Morning Dispatch detailed recently, Congress has delegated some of its tariff power to the president in a few laws, but those statutes require the executive branch to conduct investigations to justify tariffs on products and countries. They stipulate lengthy processes to address specific harmful trade practices and bad actors, requirements that would be doubly challenging to meet for a universal tariff regime where the justifying harm is simply the existence of trade deficits. 'Congress knows how to grant the President authority to impose or adjust tariffs when it wishes to, and it has done so in more limited statutes,' the LJC suit argues. 'But the President has decided to avoid the limits on his authority imposed by Congress by finding a new never-before-seen authority under IEEPA.' LJC maintains the tariff regime is unconstitutional on multiple fronts, each of which would justify the court rolling back the duties imposed by the administration. The suit argues the claimed authority is not substantiated in IEEPA. But even if the president can claim to exercise tariff authority under the statute, the major questions doctrine may be at issue. The Supreme Court has ruled that if the executive branch is trying to use power delegated by Congress regarding an issue of major national significance, then Congress must 'speak clearly' in authorizing such power. According to the LJC suit, the immense economic effects of the 'Liberation Day' tariffs clearly represent a 'major question.' Recent decisions suggest the Supreme Court could be sympathetic to a major questions challenge. As Northwestern University law professor Steven Calabresi noted earlier this month, the court ruled against the Biden administration several times citing the major questions doctrine, including on student loan forgiveness, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration COVID-19 vaccine mandate, the eviction moratorium during the pandemic, and the Environmental Protection Agency's attempt to push the power plant industry away from coal. LJC also argues that if IEEPA includes authority to impose universal tariffs, then the law itself violates the nondelegation doctrine—a more contested legal principle regarding the limits of Congress' ability to delegate its own authority. When Congress passes laws delegating authority, the statutes must do so according to an 'intelligible principle' that stipulate specific standards for the use of the authority 'to enable Congress, the courts, and the public to ascertain whether Congress's guidance has been followed,' the suit notes. Since IEEPA does not mention tariffs, it sets out no such standards or limitations. 'If there are any constitutional limits to delegation at all, they apply here, in a case where the executive claims virtually limitless authority to impose massive tax increases and start a worldwide trade war,' LJC said. The California case makes several similar arguments to LJC but signposted them differently. 'Interestingly, California's complaint doesn't use the terms 'major questions' and 'nondelegation,' both of which have negative connotations for some on the left,' Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University working on the LJC suit, wrote last week. 'But they cite the relevant precedents and make the relevant points.' If the courts issue temporary restraining orders (TROs) or preliminary injunctions in the LJC or California cases, most or even all of the president's IEEPA tariff regime could be halted while the litigation plays out. On Friday, LJC filed a request seeking a TRO and a preliminary injunction. Jeffrey Schwab, LJC's lead attorney on the case, told The Dispatch that ideally the court would enjoin the tariffs by the end of this week. To justify a quick halt to the tariffs, the plaintiffs bringing a lawsuit must demonstrate proof they'll suffer irreparable harm in the near term if the court doesn't take action. In the LJC suit, the plaintiffs are all small businesses, including a specialized liquor importer and distributor based in New York, a Utah company that manufactures plastic drainage pipes in the U.S. using resin imported from Taiwan and South Korea, and a Virginia business that makes educational electronic kits and musical instruments using components imported from China, Mexico, Taiwan, and Thailand. 'We are required to post our prices with the State Liquor Authority a full month in advance, so we're locked into pricing decisions that don't account for these sudden, unpredictable tariffs,' said Victor Owen Schwartz, the liquor importer. 'This is devastating to our ability to operate and support the farmers and producers we work with around the world.' Unlike corporations with large capital reserves, small businesses affected by the tariffs may be unable to keep paying the duties and wait for compensation until after the case is resolved in court. 'I think it would be harder for, say, a Walmart to show irreparable harm, because at the end of the day, they could pay the tariffs, stay in business, and get a rebate of $3 billion in a year,' Peter Harrell, an attorney who specializes in international regulatory issues and served as the senior director for international economics in the Biden White House, told The Dispatch (Harrell's writing on the tariffs is cited in the LJC filing). 'Some of these small guys, on the face, it seems plausible if they've got to pay all these tariffs, they might not be able to make ends meet.' LJC could face some hurdles given the jurisdiction it chose to file in: the Court of International Trade (CIT). As our own Sarah Isgur noted on Advisory Opinions, the CIT has jurisdiction over legal challenges involving laws that provide for tariffs, potentially offering support to the government's claim that IEEPA is a law providing for tariffs. The other suits were filed in the regionally relevant district courts, and the government has filed motions trying to transfer them to CIT. Schwab, the LJC attorney, told The Dispatch he's prepared to contest an argument trying to attach the jurisdiction to the merits questions at the heart of the case. He also emphasized the arguments in the suit that would still apply even if IEEPA is assumed to authorize tariffs. Schwab believes his case may be best positioned to get temporary relief quickly from the court, but he's glad to see other challenges coming from parties as wide-ranging as conservative legal groups and Democratic politicians in Montana and California. 'It also represents that this really is not a partisan matter,' he said. 'This is about the harm to businesses and the power of the president. I don't view this as a political thing at all.'
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Are Trump's 'Liberation Day' Tariffs Illegal?
In the wake of what President Donald Trump called "Liberation Day," Victor Owen Schwartz has been scrambling. As the owner of VOS Selections, a New York-based importer and distributor of wines and spirits, Schwartz is required by state law to list his prices every month on a publicly available database. The day after Trump's tariffs were announced, he was poring over his records—drawn from more than 300 suppliers across six continents—and trying to figure out what to do with each of the thousands of stock-keeping units (SKUs) in his inventory. "We had to go through every single SKU to make a strategic decision about what we were going to do with our prices on that item. When it was shipping, what was in stock, when we think we're going to have to reorder, what was going to be the impact," Schwartz told Reason in an interview on Tuesday. It's not just the added cost that's been a problem—though that is certainly a big one in a competitive industry running on small margins. It's also the fact that tariffs have been on and off and on again in recent weeks. That's made it "impossible" to plan ahead, Schwartz says, and has left him unable to know what he's buying, how much he needs to sell, or what the future could hold for his 19 employees. For Schwartz and many other American business owners, there's no doubt that Trump's tariffs have sowed uncertainty, fractured supply chains, and raised prices. They also violated the law, a newly filed lawsuit argues. Schwartz is one of several plaintiffs in that lawsuit, filed Monday by the Liberty Justice Center (LJC), challenging the Trump administration's authority to levy the 10 percent across-the-board tariffs the president announced last month. The lawsuit argues that Trump has overstepped the authority granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and that Congress could not delegate such broad, unlimited powers to the president even if it wanted to do so. "No one person should have the power to impose taxes that have such vast global economic consequences," Jeffrey Schwab, a senior attorney for the LJC, a nonprofit public interest law firm, tells Reason. Since its passage in 1977, the IEEPA has been used dozens of times to impose sanctions on foreign countries, but it had never been used to set tariffs on imports to America until Trump invoked the law in February to tariff imports from Canada, China, and Mexico. (That use of the law has also been challenged by the LJC in a separate lawsuit.) On April 2, the White House again invoked the IEEPA to levy 10 percent tariffs on nearly all imports to the United States, and higher tariffs on goods from certain other countries based on a crude (and inaccurate) calculation of the trade barriers imposed by those countries on American goods. Those higher tariffs are now on hold, but the 10 percent universal tariffs took effect last week. In the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade, the plaintiffs argue that the IEEPA authorizes emergency powers only in response to "unusual and extraordinary" threats to the United States. Trade deficits, which the White House claims are the emergency the tariffs are meant to address, are neither unusual nor extraordinary—and Trump's 10 percent tariffs apply even to imports from countries that run a trade surplus with the United States, like Brazil. More to the point: It is simply untrue that the wines Schwartz imports from France or Italy constitute an emergency that threatens Americans. And even if Congress did intend to give the president such sweeping powers, that delegation of authority would be unconstitutional, Schwab argues. That's because it would run afoul of the "major questions" doctrine, which requires Congress to decide issues of "vast economic and political significance" and which has recently been the basis of some prominent Supreme Court cases. "I think having power over essentially the worldwide economy," Schwab says, "if anything's a major question, it's that." The post Are Trump's 'Liberation Day' Tariffs Illegal? appeared first on
