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Old July 19th, 2006, 03:06 AM posted to rec.travel.usa-canada,misc.transport.road
Alohacyberian
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Default Driving cross country with expired tags - how to avoid police?

wrote in message
ups.com...
wrote:
I'm going to be driving from Washington, DC to northern Louisiana with
an LA license plate that expired a couple of years ago. Insurance and
driver's license are okay. Any suggestions about what route I should
take or how I can avoid getting pulled over? I'm a pretty safe driver,
don't speed...going to try and make sure my car is clean and not
conspicuous...

Should I just stick to major interstates and hope a cop doesn't get
close enough to notice? What about smaller, more remote highways and
local roads? (Travel time is not a concern...)

Does anyone have suggestions about specific states, cities, or roads I
should avoid? I've heard plenty about cops in the south being worse
about hassling drivers from out of state. I've heard bad things about
Lousiana police on I-10, too, and although I won't have to drive very
far into LA, I'm concerned about getting nabbed there, where the police
will certainly know what color my tag is supposed to be.

Has anyone else done this? Any suggestions would be very helpful!


Here's another point of view - chances are, the cops won't notice.

It depends on what state you're coming from. It's doubtful the cops
have every state's tags memorized. It actually shouldn't be that hard.
Consider New Jersey - they stopped providing registration stickers in
2004. Many people are driving around with tags that appear to have
expired in 2004, but in reality they are completely legal.

So hey, go for it.

You're absolutely right, most police officers don't care about expired
plates if they're from another state. However, most states have what is
called a "permit to transport", which you can get from the local DMV. They
are most commonly used for people who buy a car in, say, Colorado and want
to have it licensed and registered in their home state when they get there,
so they get a "permit to transport". I was planning to buy a new car about
10-12 days after my old plates expired. So rather than pay for a whole year
on the old car, I decided to walk to work or take the bus until I was ready
to buy. I became very keyed to license plates and discovered after only a
few trips to work that he heck of a lot of cars have expired tabs. I
happened to run into a police officer and asked him about that and he said,
"No we see that as the DMV's problem and we won't pull anyone over for
expired tags, but, if we pull them over for something else, we'll ticket
them for expired tags". So, it's probably different in different
jurisdictions. Just this year, I noticed that my tabs were expired and
realized that I'd neglected to put them on the car after I got them. I'd
been driving around for months with expired tags and was never pulled over.
KM
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