The technology that will transform — maybe even future-proof — our roads
A Sidewalk Talk Q&A with Cavnue CEO Tyler Duvall
Last year, SIP — a company spun out of Sidewalk Labs that’s focused on the future of infrastructure — launched Cavnue, whose mission is to build the world’s most advanced roads. This is the second in a series of three interviews with Cavnue leaders. You can see our interview with Cavnue CTO Jaime Waydo here.
Back when Tyler Duvall worked in the Department of Transportation he would confront the complex challenges facing our roads — from congestion to accessibility to safety — on a daily basis. Unfortunately, those big problems still exist today. “It’s not acceptable that 40,000 people die every year,” he says. “It’s not acceptable that people are wasting hundreds of hours in their cars with all other environmental and health effects associated with that. It’s just not acceptable.”
In his continued effort to help address those big problems, Duvall recently co-founded Cavnue, a company that is bringing connected, autonomous technology to roads in and around U.S. cities. We spoke with Duvall about Cavnue’s upcoming projects in Michigan and Maryland, and the role roads will play in the proliferation of autonomous vehicles.
Watch a video of our conversation above or read the edited transcript below.
Vanessa: Today we’re joined by Tyler Duvall. Tyler is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cavnue. Before joining Cavnue, he was the CEO of the SH 130 Concession Company, which is a public/private toll road partnership in Central Texas. He was previously a principal at McKinsey and also served in several roles in the U.S. Department of Transportation, including as Acting Under Secretary for Policy. Tyler, thank you so much for joining us.
Eric: Tyler, thank you for joining us. We’re really excited about Cavnue. I wanted to hear from you, what’s the story behind the creation of Cavnue? Why is now the right moment for this type of company to emerge?
It’s a great question, Eric. We have this confluence of factors emerging in transportation, in society, and in the broader economy around the world, and you have multiple forces that have driven us to this point. I think, most importantly, we have a transportation network that is in desperate need of innovation. We need the innovation shock that I think many other sectors of the economy have experienced. You’ve seen healthcare, you’ve seen the broader tech sector, you’ve seen education, you’ve seen telecommunications, energy. All of these sectors have seen this wave of innovation and investment by some of the most brilliant people in the world. Transportation infrastructure has lagged that way, and now, I think, is the time to bring all the intelligence, the new thinking to our road system.
Our road system has underperformed because it hasn’t had that. We’ve seen congestion levels that have spiked around the world in metropolitan areas. We’ve seen environmental problems in CO2 emissions. The transportation sector now is the major contributor in many countries to CO2 emissions. And we’ve just generally seen an overall decline in safety performance, too, around the world.
So this is a multi-tier problem, and at this moment, we finally see the technologies that others have benefited from coming to fruition in our market now. Obviously, the autonomous vehicle revolution happening on the vehicle side was also happening. And so I think, again, we do have this great confluence. The time is right. We obviously have a new administration that’s going to focus intensely on innovation in the United States, but we also see it around the world. So I couldn’t have joined at a better time. Some of it was dumb luck, but I think most of it was good thinking.
Vanessa: So you’ve named a lot of the challenges that are facing cities right now in terms of road infrastructure. When you think about the biggest areas of need for advanced road technology, what do you think they are?
So we’ve been thinking about multiple use cases. In the urbanized environment, you have what’s called boulevard roadways or roadways with some features of entry and exit that are not typical of a limited access highway, so non-interstate roadways, that serve hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day in many of our biggest cities in the United States. These roadways are dilapidated, facing significant physical constraints. We’ve got a lot of concerns in communities in and around those areas, and so you basically just see a systematic problem with those specific sets of roadways. Pre-Covid, [they were] highly congested, highly inefficient, and producing lots of negative externalities that we’re going to focus on. That’s use case one, and that’s what our Michigan project in some ways has started to be focused on.
Use case two is the interstate highway system itself, which is the largest public works project in the history of the world. The United States built it out similar to what we saw in Germany, the Autobahn; the Chinese are building a similar network today. So we call it the major freight network of the United States. This is the envy of the world in many cases, because it’s so big, but it’s not operating that efficiently today. We have a massive physical capacity, but not necessarily a lot of operating efficiency. So our long-haul freight networks need to be modernized. We need more technology-oriented interstates. We need much safer roadways. We have a huge number of fatalities in the truck sector tied to unsafe roads and other conditions. So I think one of the most exciting things we’re starting to talk to states about is multi-state truck corridors where we can actually have autonomous or augmented travel that will go safer, faster, more reliably, and frankly, more productively for the trucking industry that has seen driver shortages. And most importantly, in some ways, cleaner trucks too long term.
Then the third one that we’re getting really interested in are these bottleneck areas in and around major points. So think about seaports and airports where you see huge distribution facilities; Amazon, Walmart, and others are building these massive distribution facilities to reorient towards the current economy. There are big opportunities to rethink how we serve those points. Autonomous travel coming into and out of those distribution facilities has the potential to save huge amounts of resources, [to help] redeploy those resources to higher, better use cases, et cetera.
So those are the three big ones. And then, obviously, the urban transportation environment is so complex that we’re going to have to be nimble to work on lots of different projects. I mean, there is no point-to-point commuter route any more. Commuters are moving in very diverse and complex ways. No one appreciated 35, 40 years ago, [when they] were planning a lot of these metropolitan routes, how complex the demand profile was going to be for urban transportation. So imagine a hybrid of — call it the Boulevard Option and the Interstate Option. So in Michigan, we’re working on both Michigan Avenue and Interstate 94, and that’s because travel in that corridor is not simple. You’ve got a transit service in the corridor, you’ve got heavy freight traffic in the corridor, and then you’ve got a lot of point-to-point commuter service as well. So transportation to me is the most complex network of all the utilities, and, as a result, I think our business model is going to have to be pretty nimble.
Eric: Tyler, you mentioned the Michigan project, and I think we want to talk a little bit more about that in a second. But first, I wanted to make sure listeners understand when you talk about connected infrastructure what you mean. How do you define that and why is it so essential to this future you’re talking about?
Right. The name of our company has both connected and autonomous in it, so it’s a creative use of that. With connected, I think it’s the extent to which vehicles are communicating with each other and communicating with roadside infrastructure.
For many years, there was a sense that vehicles and manufacturers would solve the connected vehicle problem through creating their own technology platforms. So BMW would work with General Motors, would work with Toyota to basically figure out a communications platform so that all vehicles on a roadway are talking to each other at all times. Signals are being sent from a driver who’s three miles ahead that there’s an emerging dangerous condition on the roadway. There’d be communication around other events that are happening to allow drivers to make different choices. And that started to happen, but it’s happened much more slowly than I think people projected, say, 10 years ago when I started working on this.
I think the infrastructure side, what’s happening on the roadway, the projections around that, the forecasts and the actual conditions around it, we found that the installation of hardware on the roadway can actually help us really mitigate some of the gaps in that communications platform between the vehicle manufacturers. So our company, we believe, sits at this intersection of all of this innovation among the vehicle manufacturers, and puts us right in the middle on the roadway side. Our goal is that our hardware solution backed with the digital twin, that I know our CTO will be talking about soon, will give an operating platform so that everybody knows everything that’s going on at all times around the conditions of the roadway, hazards, other efficiencies that we can bring to it. Transit vehicles can understand where they can pick up and drop off more efficiently, they can build a dynamic aspect to this to the communications side.
And we can talk more about the autonomous side, but that’s ultimately, the biggest long-term benefits to society and to the economy are going to come from unlocking autonomous travel. It is truly one of the top three or four most important innovations I think in the history of the United States and hopefully the world. And I think, as you’ll hear from our CTO, the challenges that the vehicle manufacturers have had to deal with, all the complexity of the edge, as they call it, the edge case complexity, is much bigger. She used the term “infinite,” which maybe she’ll use again later when you guys talk to her. But I mean, this is just so compelling to listen to people who spend their lives trying to crack these problems on the vehicle side talk about how much easier it would be if they had an infrastructure side solution to complement that. And that’s what we’ve decided to build our company around.
Vanessa: So you guys have some really interesting projects coming down the line. You already mentioned one, Michigan. Hopefully, we’ll talk about the other one too. But let’s start there. I mean, what is the Michigan project going to be and what are you excited to learn from it?
Right. So it’s our flagship project. The way we think of Michigan, we call it the “top-down solution.” If you’re stepping back and you said, “Hey, we want to design an autonomous vehicle lane way between two points and we want to create a playing field or pilot area to do that,” that’s what Michigan is. So the Governor of Michigan has been very supportive of us, the Lieutenant Governor. The Michigan Department of Transportation basically said, “You’ve got a 40-plus mile stretch between two major points, Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan is, and downtown Detroit, and in the middle, we have the airport, one of the biggest airports in North America, and figure out what the route should be, what the commercial model should be, what the technology solution should be, what the civil engineering design should be. Figure all that out. Come to us, work with us, partner with us, and then we’ll sign a long-term implementation agreement.”
So we’re about six months into the project, have great progress, great partnership. The state has been incredibly receptive to working with us. They’ve got great experts as well. And so right now, we’re, let’s say, in the deep throws of project planning and design, and our technology team has got to figure out what the technology stack looks like. Is it a hardware kit every 100 yards? Is it every 350 yards? What do the vehicles need to deliver the confidence that state governments are going to need that this is a safely designed hardware system, software platform, et cetera? So all of that’s underway. We’re in a full sprint.
My background is more on the commercial, financial, and legal side, and one of the things that’s very interesting is we’re really redefining what a partnership with state government looks like. There are many technology firms that are selling specific products or services, and there are many firms that are looking to privatize a toll road, for example. We’re not doing either. We’re here as a long-term operating partner, technology partner, and I think that’s where we see the breakthrough, which is a new model of partnership where government can turn to the private sector, who’s pushing all this innovation, and get it into the roadway faster and easier than they would have been able to do it solely by themselves.
Eric: Tyler, can you tell us a little bit about the other project that Cavnue recently launched as well? I think this was in Maryland or the Metropolitan D.C. area. What is that project and what are the objectives there?
Right. So, look, we’re really excited. Obviously, the Michigan project, we thought we were going to spend all of our time on that, and then like any great idea, we realized there are lots of other people interested in the idea. So we’ve already won our second major project in partnership with Transurban and Macquarie, two major toll road developers and financiers, two of the best in the world. We’re a partner on what’s called the I-270/I-495 Managed Lane, the largest road project in North America. It’s basically an extension or expansion of the managed lane network that started in Virginia. These are lanes that are dynamically priced, so a driver will come up, see the price based on the current congestion levels in the lane, and decide is it worth 68 cents a mile, 42 cents a mile, 12 cents a mile to use the lane tied to reliable speeds. And that’s been proven successful in I think over 10 cities in the United States now, very popular. And right now the private sector basically is pioneering this technology platform.
And our role is to be the long-term future-proofing partner to the project. Because the project is a 50-year contract, it’s pretty certain that over that time period, there’ll be substantial innovation and disruption to the way we travel — we all hope! And in that regard we’re the partner to ensure that happens seamlessly in the most sophisticated way possible and to benefit the public. So it’s a great role. It’s a large-scale greenfield project, so this will take many years to develop. But it’s pretty exciting for a small company like ours to already be involved in the largest project in North America.
Vanessa: Very exciting. And so when you look ahead and you imagine what’s what’s to come, what would success look like for Cavnue do you think, and what are the obstacles that might make it hard to achieve it?
I feel like I’m back in McKinsey with that kind of question, come on! No, look. I think there’s obviously near term, medium term, and long term. That’s always the kind of way to think about these things. I think in the near term, successful delivery of the Michigan project is job one. It’s our highest priority, most important platform to test out the concept of Cavnue, and is it real, can it work, et cetera.
Obviously delivering on Maryland and being a really good partner to both the state and to our consortium partners there is job two.
And then we’ve got a pipeline that’s already emerging, so we’re in conversations now with I think over 10 different state governments, talked to some international governments. The appetite for this is incredible. And I think for us, in I’d say a two-year horizon, I’d like to have two to three more projects moving forward in some sort of contract phase with the government. And then hopefully, say from two to five years using a medium-term horizon, we would love to grow that to 10 or 12. And the point there being, we’ve got confidence from the public that this works, we’ve got the auto industry saying that their products can safely move on these lanes, and we have government officials saying that it achieves the multiple policy objectives that they’ve set out for these projects, which are multiple. These are not single policy objective projects as you know. So I think all of that, in a two-to-five-year time period, hopefully we’ll have live things out there. People can experience these roadways, and the public will have confidence in them.
And then beyond that we do view this as a longer term almost utility model. We’d love to be the kind of 24/7 utility provider to states. Take on a network in an area wide system, as opposed to just single point to point service. That would be where I think efficiently it should go. Now obviously states need to be comfortable with that. And we’ve got great partners with Alphabet and with Ontario teachers. We’ve got great partners with the industry. I’ve done a lot of consulting and I’ve run businesses, I’ve never seen the conditions for success come together like they’ve come together here at the moment that it’s happened.
Eric: That is great to hear. Tyler one last question for you and then we’ll let you go. Vanessa and I, and everybody at Sidewalk, we spend a lot of time thinking about how technology and how companies like Cavnue can impact the future of cities, can impact people’s lives in a positive way. What impact do you hope Cavnue can have on the people who live in cities and the metropolitan areas that are connected by your roads?
It’s a great question Eric. And first of all, thanks so much for your time. I’m a huge fan of Sidewalk, I’ve always followed you all from the beginning of your formation and you’ve made major contributions. And I think the problem statement that Sidewalk Labs was founded on is not that dissimilar from what ours is, which is we want to make a positive contribution to the way people live. And that includes obviously safe travel, reliable travel. There are populations that can’t access that today, there are major disruptions that are happening around the way we move that cause huge economic effects and dislocation. And obviously there are just the major obvious impacts negatively of congestion and safety on the roadway every day. It’s not acceptable that 40,000 people die every year. That’s not something that we should be saying, yeah, that’s okay. It’s not acceptable that people are wasting hundreds of hours in their cars with all other environmental and health effects associated with that. It’s just not acceptable.
And if we can solve it with technology, why not? Why wouldn’t we solve it? And I think the problem with transportation is people have just gotten really complacent about how solvable these big problems are. I used to say when I was in government, that this is the easiest big problem to solve in society. Healthcare is tough, education’s tough. This is tough, but it’s easier than those. And we can solve it with technology. And it will have profound ramifications on the way cities develop, where people live, how they live, the benefits they achieve from transportation. I’ve done a lot of research in looking at the real estate impacts of inefficient transportation. Everything about the way, particularly American cities have developed, have been in some ways a response to inefficiencies embedded in our transport networks. And hopefully we can help correct that.
That’s not an overnight easy problem to solve, but if we start to unwind some of the disincentive, basically the incentive problems that are embedded in our transportation system that impact everything else, then maybe we can have an even more profound effect than I would have imagined.
Follow Sidewalk Labs with our weekly newsletter or subscribe to our podcast, “City of the Future.”
