Episode five of the Infrastructure Technology Podcast features an interview with Tyler Duvall, CEO and co-founder of Cavnue, who discusses the future of smart roadways and the I-94 CAV Corridor project in Michigan.
Below is a transcript:
GJ: Welcome to the Infrastructure Technology Podcast. I'm Gavin Jenkins, senior managing editor of Roads and Bridges, and with me as always, we have the jack of all trades at Endeavor Business Media, Harley Hewitt, associate editor of Construction Equipment and Roads and Bridges. And then we have the man, the myth, the legend, Brandon Lewis, associate editor of Mass Transit magazine. How are you two doing today?
BL: Boy, I guess my legend is getting up there. Episode five, standalone episode. Here we go.
GJ: Yeah, this is a standalone episode where we only have one guest, however it does translate to both our audiences, Mass Transit and Roads and Bridges, And before we dive into this interview with Tyler Duvall from Cavnue, let's talk about Michigan. First off, you both are residents of Ohio, and so therefore, and Brandon, you grew up in Ohio, so I imagine you have thoughts on the state of Michigan.
BL: I actually don't, to be honest with you.
GJ: You don’t have any thoughts?
BL: I don't.
GJ: Okay. How old were you when you first realized that Michigan was shaped like a mitten?
BL: To be honest with you, probably like 10, 11. My geography skills were never great as a kid, so it took me a while to grasp that concept.
GJ: Okay. Harlee, growing up in Oklahoma, what did you think of the state of Michigan?
HH: I thought, first word. if you flashed it in front of me and said, “What's your first word that comes to your mind?” I would say cold.
GJ: Cold.
HH: I would say Eminem.
GJ: Eminem. So you immediately think of the rapper Eminem? 8 Mile, lose yourself, that sort of thing?
HH: Detroit.
GJ: Slim Shady.
HH: And that's pretty much it. That is the cultural markers that you get, I guess, when you're from Oklahoma.
GJ: Okay. Alright. When I was growing up, when I heard of Michigan, I thought of the Fab Five, Michigan basketball team. Chris Weber, Juwan Howard. Then I thought of the Detroit Pistons. Basically everything was sports related.
BL: The Bad Boy Pistons.
GJ: Bad Boys.
BL: Yeah, same.
GJ: But today, I think Michigan is much different to kids growing up today. I think they might think about maybe the Detroit Lions. They might think of Detroit as a city bouncing back after being bankrupt, but I think that after you listen to this interview, you might think of Michigan as a leader, a leader in not just cars, but also infrastructure. And what we're going to be talking about with Tyler Duvall is we're going to be talking about the Cavnue CAF CAV Corridor. It's a first of its kind, connected and automated vehicle corridor, and this will help Michigan drivers in smart infrastructure and future of mobility. It starts off in August 2020. Gretchen Whitmer, who's the governor of Michigan, she announced an initiative to develop a first-of-its-kind corridor for connected and automated vehicles, and the corridor is designed to improve transportation for communities in Southeast Michigan, and a key goal of the CAV corridor was to future proof Michigan roads for transportation and mobility of people and goods across the state and that includes supporting transit along the corridor, so what you have here is a connected corridor, a smart corridor and the leading developer was Cavnue. This is a company that has been leading the way in roadway infrastructure and technology, and my interview is with Tyler Duvall, who is the CEO and co-founder of Cavnue. Let's take a listen.
GJ: Tyler Duval, welcome to the ITP. How are you doing today?
TD: Good to be here, Gavin. Doing well.
GJ: Alright, today we are going to talk about your company, Cavnue and its work with the Michigan Department of Transportation. So before we dive into the I-94 project, tell us a little bit about Cavnue and the company's background.
TD: Yeah, sure. Thank Gavin. So we started this almost exactly four years ago under two simple problem statements. One is roadways of today are not safe enough. They're not efficient, they're not reliable, and some of the performance indicators that we saw, even pre-COVID got worse during COVID, and there's just an imperative to improve roadway performance, operations and safety independent of technology or advanced vehicles. But when you throw in the fact that we see this wave of advanced vehicles getting manufactured level two vehicles, level three, and eventually obviously level four vehicles coming onto our, in the environment that I just described that are already highly problematic, there was a strong perspective that there was a need for much more advanced technology solutions to support both the transformation of today's roadways and to future-proof those roadways for the coming wave of advanced vehicles.
GJ: So then you would say that's the need that was identified, the reason why you went the connected and automated vehicle route?
TD: Exactly.
GJ: You're trying to just reduce deaths on the road in transit?
TD: It's a mixture of deaths, congestion, but then also vehicle performance. So if we think about the way roadways can accommodate all of the advanced tech that's being put onto the vehicles, we can have better pavement, we can have better lighting, but we can also have much better what we call look ahead information, so those vehicle sensors. So, if you have a car that's, call it 22, 23 year old car, it's got advanced sensors on the vehicle. It's perceiving things happening around the roadway, but it can only see what it can see, and our view is roadway should be communicating much better, more sophisticated information beyond the line of sight of those vehicles, so over the horizon, around the curve. I mean, if you're going 65 miles an hour or 70 miles an hour on a limited access highway, and you have a problem like a tire in the middle of the lane, it's a lot better to know that beyond 250 meters, and I think our view is that this kind of integration of better civil designs, better operations of roadways and better information can all come together to make those vehicles perform better.
GJ: Okay. Alright. The CAV corridors lanes are designed to test and deploy connected in autonomous vehicles. Tell us about the ways it can achieve that.
TD: Yeah, so obviously our project in Michigan is effectively a first test case of this premise that we just talked about, but the fundamental view is we need to combine hardware, and that's sensors on the roadway poles, which includes fiber, power edge computing, sensors that include radar and cameras and basically full observation of the roadway. We call it continuous coverage. So having that hardware spaced to the point that you can see all of the activity on the roadway, dangerous actors, dangerous problems, risks, emerging congestion issues ahead of the time, all the stuff that we know we can start to see better and predict, not just react, that requires continuous coverage. So the foundation is the hardware can see everything. The second piece though is the software and the secret sauce of the company is really the software, the analytics behind the observation. Okay, you see it but so what? What do you do with it and what does it actually mean? The software platform, we call it our digital twin, provides constant analysis, and this is where AI and machine learning are really revolutionizing the ability to take a lot of observations and then translate them into insights, both for government that owns and operates the roadway, and for the vehicles themselves to take that information in. So this mix of sensors and software is really the secret sauce of the company. There are many firms that are making one or two or a variety of sub components of these things, and we'll partner with them, but nobody is doing the end-to-end solution, and that's what we thought we wanted to do when we came to market.
GJ: Alright, so I just realized something. Okay, in the previous question I said ‘CAV’, and that stands for Connected and Automated Vehicle. Are you pronouncing it CAV or C.A.V.?
TD: We call it CAV, but we can call it C.A.V. We can call whatever you want.
GJ: Okay. Alright. Now, I just put two and two together. It's still morning. I'm still kind of slow. I haven't had enough coffee. And so the company's name, Cavnue, it's a play on words for connected and automated vehicle, and then the new part is like avenue?
TD: Correct. That's it. You nailed it.
GJ: Okay, okay. See, I have a master's degree.
TD: Gavin, you're the first person that put that together in any of these podcasts.
GJ: No! Oh my goodness! I feel so special now. Okay, so let's backtrack a little bit and talk about Michigan. So the Michigan project is on Interstate 94, and it's called the I-94 CAV Corridor, and it's a smart road deployment that will ultimately stretch from Ann Arbor to Detroit.
TD: Correct.
GJ: What else should we know about that project?
TD: Yeah, and we've deployed a pilot three mile stretch near the Detroit airport, so it's live now and folks in the region can go out and see it. What you should know about it is it's the first kind of manifestation of this vision of truly integrated hardware and sensors and software on a roadway with continuous coverage. It's the first time anyone has done that. There are lots of isolated deployments, as I said, around different elements of this, but nobody has said, “Let's take the full journey of a vehicle through a corridor and really provide these observations and insights to those vehicles and to the Michigan Department of Transportation.” That corridor, I-94, connects two of the biggest economic centers in the state of Michigan. Detroit, Ann Arbor, obviously the airport. It sits right in the middle of the corridor, and when we worked with MDOT starting back in 2020 to kind of identify the corridor that we thought would have the most impact, this was the one. We really had a lot of the interaction with MDOT around this choice of this corridor, and the reason I think we both aligned on this is we didn't want this to be a science experiment on a roadway that wasn't that impactful. We wanted to do it on a roadway that is carrying a hundred thousand plus vehicles, lots of truck traffic, a really complicated environment because the benefits go up for this platform, the more complicated the roadway itself is. And this is a high-speed interstate. Obviously I-94 is one of the most important interstates in the U.S. It runs way out west, and so we selected this one. Ford is a major partner of ours from a technical collaboration perspective, so we are running Ford vehicles up and down this pilot stretch to try to provide insights around how their vehicles, their advanced vehicles perform in this kind of environment.
GJ: Okay. Well then, that might answer my next question. I was going to ask why Michigan? Why the Michigan DOT? Because I imagine every DOT in the country would be jumping at the chance to work with you on something like this, so I imagine because of your partnership with Ford, it was like, “Hey, I-95 here in Michigan.”
TD: Yeah, it's funny. The governor of Michigan, Governor Whitmer, and Ford, Bill Ford, who's a longtime founder, member of the Ford family and a legend in the auto industry, the two of them I think really clicked on this idea of not just building smart cars in the state of Michigan, but also deploying the smartest infrastructure, so that vision really crystallized with their partnership. And then we, as a company, obviously really brought forward some really good ideas. I mean, we have a contract in Texas, soon to be another contract in another large southeastern state, so I agree with you. This is a national plan for us. Michigan obviously was the first one to really jump at it though.
GJ: Okay, excellent. So does the technology on the CAV corridor help transit agencies improve their processes in any way? For example, can they benefit buses?
TD: Look, that's part of the plan. There is a transit sub component. We'd love to get transit providers in the corridor to start running advanced buses, whether those are level three or ultimately level four buses. The short answer is yes. In fact, the dedicated lane environment is quite good for high-performing transit, more reliable trips, ect. So clearly as part of the vision for the build out of the full 41 miles Gavin, transit will be a critical piece of that.
GJ: Okay. So does the technology on the CAV corridor, does it have any current limitations or challenges to integrating with other roads and interstates across the country?
TD: Yeah, so I think the platform is fairly standard. Obviously the biggest thing is just the unique configuration and operations of different roadways. I mean, we have standards for interstates across the U.S., but as you know, anybody who drives interstates, there's a lot of variability within those standards. I mean the shoulder width, the lane width (by the way, some lanes are 12 feet, some are 11, they even have some 10-foot lanes in some places). You've got shoulder width, you've got medians that you can put sensors in the median, other medians that are not wide enough to do that. So it's really honestly case specific. So our project in Texas has a very different layout. It has a huge wide median, which by the way, makes sensing across the entire facility more challenging even if it makes it easier to put that sensing in the median physically. So there's these physical questions of where do you put the sensing capabilities? So those are the big variables that you have to solve on a project by project basis, but the whole concept of a digital roadway is going to scale very fast. So once we can map the roadway, see what's going on from the software perspective. This is the big change: In the last 10 or 15 years, the advancements in software have allowed us to add additional capabilities, so map new roadway. So extend 94 further west in Michigan. Look at I-96 in Michigan and then I-35 in Texas. All these roadways, the software piece of this is going to be much easier to continue to scale. It's really going to be the physical question of where do you put the sensing capability? How do you get power there? So what we learned a lot of lessons on, you got to have power, you got to have fiber. A lot of roadways in the United States do not have fiber in them today, or if they do, it's what's called dark fiber that has to be turned on. So in Michigan, we laid our own fiber. We had to trench it and build it in. This is not currently the amount. The volume of information Gavin that you're streaming off the roadway requires fiber. Frankly, from a cost perspective, it'd be way too prohibitive just to use the cell network for that.
GJ: Wow. There's some fascinating stuff. It leads to my next question, which is what is the future of this?
TD: Yeah, look, our view is that this is what roadway is going to look like. That what we're building in Michigan is effectively a new standard for intelligence in roadways now like the automobiles, where you have a level two vehicle, level three, vehicle level four, etc. We think there's going to become standards associated with capabilities of highways. We are starting on limited access highways, which largely interstates or the national highway system, which carry, call it 25 to 40 percent of the vehicle traffic in the United States. Interstates are about a quarter. Nashville highway system, which is similarly configured. Roadways is another 15 percent so about 40 percent of the traffic VMT in the United States is on these roadways. All of the ITS and technology for the most part has been focused on intersections and cities, and so I think what we'd really like to do is showcase that, “Hey, we can deploy a integrated smart roadway stack into our limited access corridors where you see huge speed differentials.” Lots of safety issues, lots of congestion, and we can start to just scale it, and we can wide roadways. We could double deck them. We could do all that stuff. This is much faster. This is months to modernize, not decades and years to modernize.
GJ: Yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned that, the timeline of it, because it makes me wonder about the rural roads. I mean obviously you're going to be reshaping how the interstate system is, but once you get off that interstate, you're on country roads and how long until those can be brought up to speed as well?
TD: Yeah, look, I think we need a prioritization framework. Not to sound like a consultant, but we do need to figure out how to prioritize our resources effectively. So to your point, you've got a lot of rural roadways that are carrying high volumes of trucks in unsafe environments. You see a disproportionate amount of crashes on those roadways. You see less power and fiber in those areas, by the way, so they're not ready in many ways for this intelligence that we're talking about. So what we'd love to do with states is to prioritize their corridors. Look at your 10 most important corridors from a safety perspective. There'll be a mix of urban, rural and ex-urban roadways. Maybe there's two rural roadways that are carrying a lot of trucks, and there's three urban roadways that are carrying a lot of commuters and then there's a mix of ex-urban and suburban roadways. That kind of portfolio mix, Gavin, is kind of what we want to work with states on to identify.
GJ: Yeah, absolutely. That sounds really cool and really interesting. I imagine that’s a part of this. There needs to be a Wi-Fi system throughout the country.
TD: And we need broadband. I mean, I think what's funny is the broadband initiatives nationwide did not really think about smart roadways as the impetus. It was mostly about connectivity and obviously access to internet in different parts of the country and this uneven distribution of broadband and high- speed internet, so that was a lot of the impetus. What's funny about where we are is we are a huge consumer of that, and so suddenly, you say, “Well wait a minute.” So take your rural example. Maybe it's a stretch of 35 miles of roadway in a rural area that doesn't have a lot of broadband. All of a sudden a smart roadway platform makes it much more compelling to say, “Yes, we can deliver more capabilities to these communities, but we can also make the interstate that runs through these communities a lot safer.” I think that's, we call it an anchor tenant. The example we always use is I-10 in West Texas. You can travel for four or 500 miles on I-10. It's almost like the surface of the moon in certain cases. I mean it is way out there, hundreds of miles obviously, with very little capabilities of broadband and power and all that. All of a sudden you're like, “Well, we got 15,000 trucks on this road every day coming from Los Angeles to Jacksonville and stopping in Houston and San Antonio.” All of a sudden it's like, “Well, maybe we can actually justify these huge broadband.”
GJ: Yeah. Alright, well that's all I have for questions. This is just so interesting. I'm just curious if I failed to ask you a good question. Is there anything I didn't ask that our listeners should know?
TD: Well, look, I think for your audience, the Roads and Bridges folks, generally who are really looking at modernization. We also have been really emphasizing this dig once. So the country is going to build a lot. We're going to recapitalize all these bridges and roads, the infrastructure built, the national level, increased spending. Everybody, everybody, both sides, Republicans and Democrats and independents. Everybody's supportive of continuing to modernize our roadways. I think that's a good thing. What we are saying is, “Look, let's think about getting the tech involved in that.” Now we can start to future-proof roadways. Dig once is obviously the term, but when we go dig up a roadway to modernize and make it safer, we can install fiber, we can install some of these sensing capabilities in that process. And Michigan itself, by the way, is doing a major rehabilitation of I-94, and so one of the things we were really excited about is we could partner with MDOT to say, “As you spend hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize 94, let's actually continue to do what Cavenue's doing.”
GJ: Okay. Alright, Tyler Duvall, CEO of Cavnue. Thank you for joining us and explaining this exciting innovation going on in Michigan and in Texas as well. We hope to hear from you again.
TD: Great. Thanks Gavin. Really appreciate it.
BL: And welcome back. Thank you Gavin for that wonderful interview with Tyler, and I really thought that the interview really took a look at future of transit for public transit, specifically cameras being put on buses, developing the bus lane infrastructure, you guys talked a lot about AVs and moving towards the future, as well as trying to prevent deaths on the road and what roadways are going to look like in the future. Harlee, what did you think of the interview?
HH: I thought this was interesting because it's a corridor that is almost like a case study for a growing number of these advanced corridors. They're starting to pop up that kind of support, that improved mobility and safety, and essentially what it's doing is improving upon, like Tyler said, existing connected technologies that have existed in newer cars like 2022 to 2024 for a while, and just bringing better civil designs and better operations of roadways. And then also obviously data, which is always necessary, but I don't know. I thought it was interesting. I mean, this is something completely new really, that they came up with. And also, one thing I wanted to point out was that he talked a lot about how also collaboration was very important for this obviously, but I think it needs to be said. They said that they didn't want to just do a science experiment. He said on a road that wasn't impactful. So they worked with MDOT to identify kind of the most important one in the area, and I think that's something that we're going to continue to see is first of all, that collaboration, and then putting these things together. So, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how they develop over time too, but this is something to watch, I think.
GJ: Yeah, I agree. I think that this is really fascinating because we're at the beginning of something special where our infrastructure is going to become smarter and smarter and companies like Cavnue are collaborating with others and that's what's really important. You really hit that Harlee. They are working closely with Ford Motor Company, the University of Michigan and the American Center for Mobility and more and more big corporations and corporations that are in the transportation space are going to want to do things like this, and so you're going to see smart corridors and smart roads popping up throughout the country and like you said, this is a case study, but it has really large implications for both of our audiences, and I was really glad that Tyler gave us some time to talk about it. it's really interesting.
BL: Well, thank you Gavin. You did an excellent job.
GJ: Thank you.
BL: And that is all the time we have for today's Infrastructure Technology podcast. For Gavin Jenkins, senior managing editor of Roads and Bridges, for Harlee Hewitt, our jack of all trades at Endeavor Business Media, associate editor of Construction Equipment and Roads and Bridges, I'm Brandon Lewis, Mass Transit associate editor. Thank you to our parent company, Endeavor Business Media, for letting us have this space to do this podcast. And thank you to Ryan Curtiss, our associate producer, for this podcast. Thank you all and have a wonderful day.
