Author Archives: Tessa Zavala

Arizona includes wildlife crossings in its transportation planning. Over the past 25 years, the state has seen a 90% reduction in wildlife – vehicle accidents. This impacts rural counties the most which account for 30% of wildlife traffic accidents. Pew Charitable Trusts | Arizona Builds on Leadership With Wildlife Crossings

This week Aurora Innovation announced a deal to start hauling loads in driverless trucks for distribution giant McLane. The starting route will be Dallas to Houston and the trucks will have no human driver, but will have a human observer.

Ouster, a LiDAR company,  has added cameras to its LIDAR sensors. Ouster says that the new sensors are a decade in the making and the “holy grail of what a roboticist has always wanted.” Why does this matter? Changing policy landscapes, the high rate of scaling with robotaxis, and that robotics companies, industrial and humanoid, […]

The talk about how do jurisdictions issue traffic violations to a driverless robotaxis continues.  We started talking about this when San Francisco was grappling with a robotaxi defying the rules of the road.  California Department of Motor Vehicles is seeking comment on newly proposed driverless vehicle rules that cover how to enforce traffic laws when there […]

“Oregonians will soon be able to sue private companies that sell or otherwise improperly use data captured by license plate-reading cameras under a new state law. “ Senate Bill 1516 Oregon Capital Chronicle | A new Oregon law regulates police use of license plate readers. Here’s how it works

The FAA has announced that it will begin imposing fees on rocket launches. The FAA fee will fund the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST). The fee will begin in 2026, be based on payload, starting at $0.25 per pound and will increase incrementally. 

My apologies for including the word assetmaxxing from the source material. This trend of adding “maxxing” to the end of words is as nonsensical as it is a hellish grammar situation. Tech Crunch wants us to know that Uber is assetmaxxing with its “numerous investments ($7.5 billion) and deals with autonomous vehicle companies across drones, […]

The future will be filled with autonomous vehicle pods that move on 2 meter wide lanes. Glydways, a San Francisco-based startup developing personal autonomous pods has garnered series 2 funding at $170 million. Glydways says it can “move up to 10,000 people per hour, per lane and reduce infrastructure costs by up to 90% compared […]

Maria Tamayo-Soto, parking services manager for Las Vegas says, “Human oversight prevents errors and ensures each citation is accurate and defensible. Human review should be treated as a core feature rather than a safeguard for AI limitations. It is fundamental to legal, public and operational defensibility.” Even parking enforcement needs a human’s discernment.  Route Fifty […]

Sweden launched the world’s 1st hydrogen powered cargo ship. The ship has zero emissions. @engineering_facts