Thinking Transportation: Engaging Conversations about Transportation Innovations
Thinking Transportation: Engaging Conversations about Transportation Innovations
A Lifetime on the Move: Tyler Duvall's Lessons Learned from a Career in Transportation
Tyler Duvall--currently CEO and co-founder of Cavnue, an infrastructure company dedicated to building safer, more efficient roadways while adapting today's transportation network to the next generation of vehicles--has spent most of his professional lifetime in transportation. Having served in both the public and private sectors, Mr. Duvall brings a unique expertise to solving challenges faced by all kinds of system users. He sits down with Allan to discuss his multifaceted career, as well as his take on the best approach to transforming the U.S. transportation system to meet the needs of the 21st century. | More on Transforming Roads Unleashing Smart Technologies (TRUST)
Howdy everyone, welcome to Thinking Transportation, conversations about how we get ourselves and the stuff we need from one place to another. I'm Allan Rutter with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
Allan Rutter:Today we have the chance to visit with the national expert in transportation policy and innovation. Tyler Duvall held a number of important transportation policy positions in the office of the Secretary of Transportation, where we had the chance of working together, including Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy and Acting Undersecretary for Policy. He was a principal with McKinsey and Company, and most recently has been the CEO and now chairman of the board of the SH 130 Concession Company, and is a co-founder and CEO of Cavnue-- all of which we'll talk about. Tyler, welcome to Thinking Transportation.
Tyler Duvall:Great to see you again, Allan. You look great. Nothing's changed.
Allan Rutter:Yeah, except a little grayer.
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, we're all doing that. So yeah.
Allan Rutter:So now both of us have spent a lot of our careers in transportation. Tell our listeners a little bit about your journey to the subject. Most specifically, how does a young lawyer in private practice, just out of UVA Law School, make it to the USDOT?
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, so you know, I did my three and a half years of private practice, Allan. I did my yeoman's work to sit at my desk all day, review commercial agreements. And then I, you know, I was just getting the itch. I'm from Washington, D.C., originally, had long watched the big company called the federal government operate and literally got a call from a guy you know well, Emil Frankel, who'd been nominated to be assistant secretary, and he was kind of scouring for third- or fourth- year associates at big law firms to kind of be his special assistant. I didn't have a big transportation background. This was 2001. And literally the weekend I was actually getting married, I went and interviewed with Emil about two and a half weeks after 9-11.
Tyler Duvall:So you just remember that time. It was fairly chaotic. And the administration, who was coming in, what were we doing, what was going to happen with DOT was a huge question that I obviously ended up getting to work on. And I just fell in love with the idea of the agency over the next three or four months. He and I interacted, and I finally said, you know what? I don't want to be the lawyer the rest of my life, and jumped in. And you know, the different levels of political appointees, I was the lowest Schedule C. What was really funny about that, Allan, is at the time Emil was not confirmed, and then Jeff Shane, the under-secretary, was not confirmed, and we didn't have a political deputy assistant secretary either. So unbeknownst to me, I was the highest ranking political appointee in the entire policy office. And I did not use my power correctly. I just started to do work on the reauthorization, met you know, guys like you, and really just fell in love with the agency, honestly, from day one. It's the greatest agency, in my view, in the world. And the last thing I'll say is, it's the only agency that you can work on massive regulatory questions, massive operational questions, huge financial questions, all under one agency umbrella. And that's why I love it. But that's my favorite agency.
Allan Rutter:So now you mentioned a couple of impressive names there, and you were part of a very impressive policy shop. George Schader, Emil Frankel, Jeff Shane. How did working with that team help you learn about that whole multimodal transportation policy? And how did that equip you for more senior roles as Secretary Peters took over?
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, I mean, honestly, just really lucky. I mean, Jeff, George, Emil, and then you know, Joel Szabat came in, and then obviously Michael Jackson and his depth sec. I was like, I mean, you literally couldn't have in the office of secretary John Flaherty, who ended up being a good friend, chief of staff. You just take those six incredibly different personalities with unbelievable experience. Emil ran a state highway agency in Connecticut and was just an incredible thinker, so creative around problem solving and transportation, but with more of a surface lens. Jeff had done the job already in the federal government in the prior Bush Administration. And so when he came in and recreated the undersecretary role, he had this incredible aviation background. He's an icon. Both Emil and Jeff were just icons.
Tyler Duvall:And, you know, I just I didn't know a lot at the time, but I knew these two guys knew what they were talking about. George, you mentioned George and I became great friends. He was a career person for Federal Highway. But, you know, just Emil identified George as somebody who knew everything about how the building worked, but also how to deploy projects in the real world. That practical experience that George had... just dumb luck. I fell into this little equation that gave me all of these different experiences. And, you know, I just soaked it up. And then honestly, you know, meeting you, Allan, and Mary; Jim Simpson came in as sort of a transit administrator. I mean, it was a uniquely incredible team of people with experiences, all of whom have done great things, by the way, since they've left as well. So just dumb luck. The one thing that was really great is, I got tapped to really help write the reauthorization bill as this kind of junior kid. You know, I got the pen. We didn't have Chat GPT at the time, so we actually had to do real work. And you know, I got to write that and we had this process that Jeff a nd Emil quarterbacked that you were involved with. Let's do a really transformational bill. And I think SAFETEA-LU ended up being a pretty important moment in transportation history. So I respect how lucky I was.
Allan Rutter:Well, you and me both walking into the conference room with the other modal administrators with Secretary Mineta, I felt like a triple-A ball player called up to the Yankees. It's like, what am I doing here?
Tyler Duvall:Well, I felt like you know, a D3 college player. So and, you know, I should've mentioned Secretary Mineta, like changed my life--incredible man. Obviously, I was really distraught at his passing last year, and he changed everything. He took a bet on somebody who had not had 20 years of transportation experience. So he and John just kept promoting me. I took a little bit of a policy approach to my policy career, which was just keep moving up. In McKinsey, they call it "up or out." So you got, every two years, you got to move up. And luckily, I did seven- plus years, and each time, every two years I kind of moved up. But that was Secretary Mineta, and then ultimately Mary Peters taking a chance on me. It's funny, it's really changed my leadership approach. My willingness to take chances on particularly young people coming up who, you know, they don't have the 40 years of experience. I was like, look, I got given those chances. So the way I run Cavnue is battlefield promotions everywhere.
Allan Rutter:So yeah, I find that one of the ways you learn leadership styles is to watch people around you and the guys you enjoy working for, do more of that.
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, exactly. The other thing is just how to delegate. One of the things I never told you is, I observed you were such a steady leader of an agency going through massive problems, transformational issues, big questions about the agency, and just the calmness and also willingness to delegate to people that you believed in and trusted who are deep experts on topics. I know that sounds trite, but that administration had everybody in all the key positions sort of had that approach, was my sense.
Allan Rutter:So you mentioned the 2005 reauthorization bill. One of the things that happened as a result of that bill, Congress said, Hey, we'd like to create this National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission. You know, you've got to have a blue ribbon commission to look at stuff. But as blue ribbon commissions go, there were a lot of powerful people on there. Tell us a little bit about what it was like to create and help steer that commission, working along with Secretary Peters. And then what were some of the major findings that the commission produced, and then how much of what the commission talked about actually has ended up in transportation policy?
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, the last one's the toughest part of that question. I mean, look, obviously an incredible group of people. By the way, it was not really well known, but we had two commissions going on at the same time. I was tasked with managing both of them in many ways. And so we had the policy and revenue commission, but then the finance committee the Senate, I mean the banking committee, I think basically it said go do a finance study. So they had two committees that were pursuing, I'd say, in a Venn diagram, about 80% of the same fundamental questions. So and we had very different casts of characters on both. I mean, the policy and revenue one was obviously the more well-known-- heavy hitters from the hill, senior executives, people ran largest companies in the country. We had folks who ran Office Depot, Matt Rose. It was a who's who in transportation. What was really interesting about where we were at the time, Allan, is we were fundamentally pushing with the White House a rethinking of the whole role of the federal government in transportation, where the money comes from to adhere to that role, and then how the federal government interacts with state and local governments to administer transportation programs. We were aggressive about saying that this needed a fundamental rethink. And so we were trying through our influence to kind of get the commission to really think fundamentally. Some members of the commission were very much of the mindset, I'm not going to name names, which is like we just need more money in the existing framework. Other members were like, let's blow this thing up. Uh, we obviously needed to navigate that, like any good commission.
Tyler Duvall:We forced a lot of compromise through that process, uh, came out with some really important recommendations about unlocking additional technology, additional investment from the private sector, really focusing on system performance. If you recall, in like the early 2000s, our system was not performing that great, but this question of congestion safety, it wasn't viewed as a crisis. But you know, our view was it's not working. We have some real problems here. It's not ideal that we have people sitting hours a day in every major metro area. It's not ideal that we're still seeing no movement on fatalities, even as vehicle technologies were skyrocketing in terms of their deployments.
Tyler Duvall:And so we were stuck in this situation where we're like, we want to build on successes, but we don't want to declare that what we're doing today is the right thing. And so that's always a challenge when you have that problem framing. And I think, like I said, the things that really changed was really the growing role of state government, growing role for performance. We're gonna use performance. Everyone uses it now, like hey, KPIs, like that was not a thing. Like people in transportation were focused on planning, construction, delivery, and maintenance of assets. And we said, you know, as you know, from the railroad sector, like that's important, but once you build stuff, you actually got to maintain it and operate it efficiently. And candidly, I think some of the experiences, and Matt Rose and I had my favorite conversations, taking some of the lessons of a capital-intensive sector like the freight railroad industry and how they operationally transform their business models post-deregulation into the road system. That was my biggest interest as a policy person is how do we take these lessons of electricity, railroads, pipelines that have seen this innovation and tech and operations and bring it into roadways. By the way, which is why I'm doing what I'm doing today, that same interest.
Tyler Duvall:So I think overall, I would give it a B- plus in terms of the recommendations and a D - minus in terms of those things actually getting done in the real world. We have seen it much slower than I would have wanted. It just takes time. I mean, I was very impatient. I'm now 52. I was a lot younger then. I was very impatient. It was kind of like we need to see this move faster, you know, let's move. Truth is, moving state government, moving local stakeholders is a long, long fight. You've been in that, you know, your whole career. It just takes persistence. By the way, that's the other thing I learned is as a naive kid coming into Washington, you're like, yeah, we're going to change everything tomorrow. It's like, you got to do it the right way, you got to sustain and be relentless. But those two commissions, they're still, if you read them now, you're like, there's... sounds like a lot of the same things need to be done.
Allan Rutter:So yeah, we'll talk at the conclusion about we're near the end of another reauthorization cycle and what that looks like. I agree that one of the major features that you described, which is mainstreamed into transportation, both programming and planning, is that performance management thing. We have seen that at state DOTs across the country. Some are a lot more explicit and transparent about it than others, but everybody has to consider not just what are you building, but how is it working?
Tyler Duvall:Well, look, Allan, I gotta say-- TTI, you know, VTTI-- the push from entities like that to not just talk about the planning and construction side of transportation, but bringing policy people, performance people, operations experts into the world you're in now... like that was huge because places like TTI are huge influencers on state and federal government, like just the problem statement. Like, you know, what are we working on? One of the things Emil really instilled in me is just this huge belief in research and support for research communities, and they really do change the question that people care about in the policy arena. So we funded a lot of research. I'm a huge advocate of research because I don't think we can have an adequate debate about stuff without that.
Allan Rutter:So after your DOT, you went to McKinsey, aside from learning how to produce reports and landscape orientation as opposed to portrait, what kinds of projects and initiatives did you get to work on during your tenure there?
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, it was an incredible experience. I did 10 years. You know, when I left, I was like, I don't want to go back and practice law. My father was a lawyer, his father was a lawyer. It's like the Seinfeld episode, his mother was a mother, his father was a mother. So like, I was like, I don't want to go back and do that. And McKinsey at the time was really interested in building an infrastructure practice. They didn't have one that was dedicated. The firm had focused on serving construction engineering companies, increasingly serving public sector entities that own these assets, but not really focused on the fundamental infrastructure question. How do we plan it, deliver it, and operate it? And so actually, the head of McKinsey at the time, a guy named Dominic Barton, who was a real transformational leader, he called me personally that they were going to launch this thing. I'd gotten to know the McKinsey team through some work they were doing with a client in South America. By the way, just one caveat. McKinsey, we don't talk about our clients unless it's public record. So I can't reveal a lot of those confidence, but the projects I worked on were incredible across the world--Middle East, in India, in the United States, obviously, in South America-- really on literally every question you could think of in infrastructure. How do we organize our teams? How do we deploy in-the-field technologies better? How do we frankly have an actual strategy around asset deployment and maintenance? I mean, all these big questions. The one thing I got to work on at the end of my career was really fascinating was the restructuring of the island of Puerto Rico that had gone through a bankruptcy. Congress had to create its own law associated with effectively an island like territory going bankrupt called ProMesa. And we were hired by the oversight board that was effectively a federal oversight board to restructure all of the debt and put a fiscal plan in place for the future. That was a phenomenal experience. I spent about my final year and a half to two years in McKinsey working with about 50 other McKinsey folks on that. So I mean, what I love about McKinsey is the training around these big fundamental questions and how to think about them, how to attack them, how to analyze them. Obviously, Michael Jackson has a quote-- Michael Jackson, Allan-- has a quote that he always used about PowerPoint. I'm sure you've heard it. You know, power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. So I use that line all the time, and I do attribute it to him. But uh, you know, McKinsey, I went deep into the PowerPoint world. You know, I started at about seven or eight years in, starting to feel like I was reaching another inflection point in my career, and I really wanted to run something. And I loved advising CEOs and senior people and government on things to do. But you know, you've been in a chair where you're actually running things. It does feel different to be the decision maker versus the advisor. And I just got to the point where I was like, I think I'm ready to do something else. But the training around how to make decisions effectively is the best in the world at McKinsey. And I will always cherish my time there and my colleagues as well.
Allan Rutter:Well, it sounds like one of the things, after having watched really, really smart people at USDOT, this offered you some additional ways of, this is how we think about things. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an engineer either. So I kind of come at things from a slightly different angle than many of my engineers here at TTI. But it sounds like another arrow in your quiver was to help you think about how to think about things differently.
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, not through any grand career plan, by the way. I always tell young people, like, take the next chance, listen to yourself a little bit. Everyone says trust your gut. But I think the key is to get outside your comfort zone. In a strange way, Allan, my career has kind of been the inverse of others. McKinsey taking a chance on me was something I'll never forget.
Allan Rutter:So you mentioned you were open to the opportunity of actually running something. So you moved to the SH-130 concession company. Tell us a little bit about what that is and what it was like having thought about policy, having helped people think about how to do stuff. To now you've got something that you're responsible for.
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, I'll never forget, I was actually in Puerto Rico, about to head to a client meeting, get a call from a headhunter, basically saying, Hey, you know, there's this road down in Texas called State Highway 130. It's basically a special purpose company that operates a 41-mile stretch of roadway outside Austin. I was like, Yeah, yeah, I know it. I knew that. When we were at the department, that project was talked about a lot. The time there was a TIFIA loan that had been put on the project. And he's like, Well, they're looking for a CEO. I was like, okay, that's interesting. And he talked about the owner, which is a company called Strategic Value Partners--phenomenal entity that was really focused on distressed assets with a little bit of a focus on infrastructure, industrial assets. So very unique company, very smart, talented private -equity firm. Went up, did the interviews in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was kind of like, this sounds a little strange to leave being a partner in McKinsey to go do this, but I started to look at Texas. I mean, I my grandfather was from Anson, Texas, by the way. He was a big football star from Anson, which is a very small town near Midland. Anyway, so I had always been kind of intrigued by Texas as a thing. And when I was in the Bush Administration, we worked with TxDOT extensively on, I mean, they were building so much stuff in Texas, as you know.
Tyler Duvall:So I just started to look at, I looked at that road, I was like, this is incredible potential of this asset. And it was, you know, going through distress. It had a major reconstruction challenge. The road had been built in Central Texas soils that move around quite a bit. The builder, you know, I think missed some of that movement. And so we had a huge reconstruction challenge. So I looked at this mess of a situation, and this was in late 2018, and I was like, you know what? This would be awesome. It's 40 people, you know, 75% of those people work on the road every day. We had a small corporate team, but I needed to build a team from scratch. I need to take over a distressed situation, need to figure out how to stabilize the company, deal with a private equity owner. And then the real irony of ironies is one-third of the company is owned by the federal government. The US Department of Transportation is on our board. And the TIFIA program, now the Build America Bureau, is our board member, a guy named Duane Callender, who many of the folks will know here. So they were on our board, and I was like, this is awesome. So I literally just picked... I commuted from Alexandria for about a year, and I loved it, Allan. It was an incredible experience to run a road. You've run big things. And like I said, I went from like high-level policy to like, you know, who's getting the deer or the snake or the pig off the road today, you know? It's like... which I loved. I mean, I was like, this is awesome. And really thinking about how to change the trajectory of a company with a very set of specific challenges, bring trucks onto the road. So I fell in love with it. And then, you know, COVID hit and everything changed at that point. Like I said, it was a very unique challenge around an asset class that I knew a lot about... but the road's doing great. I mean, it's been an incredible turnaround story. I think it's top three or four fastest growing routes in the country.
Allan Rutter:I think the thing that struck me, we both went from a policy leadership thing to actually running uh the actual road. I went to North Texas Tollway Authority. The thing that struck me was how many people keep running into stuff and breaking things.
Tyler Duvall:Yes.
Allan Rutter:It's like I joined NDTA when they still had toll booths and the camera shots that we had of people just blowing through toll booths, running into them, running into guardrails. I mean, it's, it's a constant thing. People traveling too fast and the fact that you have to go fix that stuff.
Tyler Duvall:Well, look, I mean, your leadership on NDTA was a big deal because I actually think to your point about our backgrounds being similar, like I'm not an engineer either. I didn't build roads myself, but you know, I do think our personalities all lump us together here running these enterprises. You ask different questions, you focus on a little slightly different set of problems. And, you know, like you, like me, very interested in, like, innovation and how do we create performance conditions to get better outcomes. NDTA became, thanks to you and others, obviously that worked for you, a real poster child of how to run an organization that people don't think of as complex, but it's really complicated. I mean, the roadways are a lot more complicated than people realize.
Allan Rutter:So shortly after joining the SH-130 guys, Sidewalk Labs, part of, I guess, Google?
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, so Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners. So Sidewalk Labs was a venture led initially by Google. There was a crew of folks, great man, a guy named Dan Doctoroff, who was the deputy mayor of New York for many years under Michael Bloomberg. He pioneered this idea called Sidewalk Labs. So it was really kind of an innovation platform to get technology into, particularly, metro areas. They had a huge project in Toronto they were working on for many years, but really creative set of products and ideas to put into urbanized areas. There's a couple of guys that were part of that that really wanted to focus on investing into asset classes and companies that were really at the intersection of infrastructure and technology. So they broke out and formed something called Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners. And there was always a relationship with Sidewalk Labs, but was a different company. But they approached me in 2020.
Tyler Duvall:So COVID hit in March of '20, as you know. I went home to Alexandria. I'll never forget we, you know, we closed the office March 11th, had dinner in Austin literally the night before with one of these guys from Sidewalk Infrastructure. I actually thought they wanted to work with us on the road. I didn't know they were actually looking to find a CEO to launch a new company. And so, you know, through that summer, I talked to SUP, the owners of the, of the toll road session, really about you know where I was and you know, living in Alexandria, Virginia, running a toll road in Austin, Texas-- probably not ideal. Nobody knew, as you know, in like June of 2020 when the world was going to reopen. And so, you know, I started talking to them. I said, Look, I think we need to get a Texas CEO down there. I've also been approached about doing something else. You know, I think it's a win-win for you all to get somebody in here. I'll help with whatever transition you need, as long as you need, but pretty excited about launching this new thing too. Anyway, they were so gracious to me and they said, Why don't you stay on as the chairman of the company? And so as part of the transition out as CEO, I became chairman in September of 2020, the day that we launched Cavnue, effectively, I joined Cavnue. So I was the first employee, and we'll get into all that. But that was how that transition worked. I'm still the co-chair now with another great transportation leader, Jennifer Ahmed, who you probably know Jen well. She and I are the co-chair of this toll road in Texas, and it's been great. And we just hired another transportation legend, uh, Ananth Prasad, who ran Florida DOT as our CEO. So we got a lot of things.
Allan Rutter:Yeah, that's some talent right there.
Tyler Duvall:Yes. And then yeah, we launched Cavnue. And as I said, it's been incredible. I mean, Cavnue really is kind of the culmination of what my career passions are, Allan. Really, just this idea of innovation and these big complex assets. Like that's been my passion.
Allan Rutter:So as I understand it, Cavnue has two major projects they're looking at, one on State Highway 130 and one in Michigan on I-94. Talking about those two projects might help our listeners understand about what the company is.
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, absolutely. So we founded a company with two basic problem statements. One is "current transportation system roadways perform poorly," as we talked about earlier in the podcast. Congestion, operational problems, safety, maintenance challenges. This is not a high-performing asset class. People were unhappy with it. And we thought technology could really do a lot more to disrupt. Obviously, there have been a push for intelligent transportation systems. I chaired the ITS management council when I was at DOT. This kind of idea of injecting technology into, particularly, roadways was a real passion of mine. And so that was problem statement one, which is like we just need more of this. And with frankly, software and emerging AI coming, it was like this is way overdue for disruption.
Tyler Duvall:But problem statement two was the catalyst. Like-- and you always you kind of always need two problem statements to have a really big thing on--so there's like a foundational problem statement, and then there's like what's the catalyst? Problem statement two was that "we're about to see all of these advanced vehicles enter into that chaotic arena." So, you know, it's not performing well today, and we're about to see level three autonomy, hands off, eyes off. We're seeing robotaxis in San Francisco and Austin. We're starting to see level four trucking, which is fully autonomous trucking in Texas between Dallas and Houston. And so it was like we got to think about how do we accelerate that, make it safer, and frankly, give more look-ahead information to those advanced vehicles. They can only see what they can see on the road. That's you know, 300 meters.
Tyler Duvall:So those two problem statements effectively collided, and we said, let's go deploy an integrated platform onto roadways, hardware, that's sensing, backward fiber, power, edge compute, all of the stuff that you can do now on the road. And then software obviously is the backbone, the insights around what we're observing on the road. That integration platform is very different than any other business in the ITS space. And we launched it in Michigan in 2020 in a project on I-94, which connects Detroit and Ann Arbor. So if any of you in Michigan, you go out, you come out of the Detroit airport, you turn right, there's this kind of lane that's sitting there out of nowhere. It's a new lane, it looks different, and there's sensors everywhere. That's our first test bed, first deployment, about three miles, to basically train all of our models around exactly how to solve these problems of incident detection, debris in the roadway, dangerous driving conditions, water on the road, all the stuff that causes risk in the system, Allan, and basically help really identify it and solve it much more quickly is the basic idea.
Allan Rutter:Well, as you talked about the need for making infrastructure be intelligent, we spend an awful lot of money to put pavement that's going to last for a long time. And we put structures and we help people stay on the road, and we help, you know, here's lane markings, here's what you need to do. But the notion of actually building into that very expensive piece of infrastructure information about what's happening on it. That's sort of, oh yeah, we should probably do something about it.
Tyler Duvall:Yeah. Well, I mean, as I said, the railroad industry is really a pioneer in some of that thinking where you have these horizontal asset classes where you need to know what's going on. You know, you're operating them, you're maintaining them. I mean, the air traffic control function, we kind of view ourselves as a bottoms-up version of an air traffic control function. You would never let planes enter, like, New York airspace without knowing where the other planes were or what was happening in that environment. There's just an operational imperative.
Tyler Duvall:I think there's the same imperative in roadways, but for a variety of reasons, society has just never demanded it or thought about it. Part of it is the technology wasn't available. And the other is the benefits were not shown. So I think technology is clearly available now, and benefits I think starting to be obvious. And so, to your point, we love this dig once idea. Like if you're gonna go reconstruct a roadway, and we've got another project in some very large southern states beyond the ones you mentioned, which we can get into. But you know, basically, if you're gonna reconstruct the road, put fiber power sensing, put all that into the roadway when you do it. Incremental cost, Allan, is literally two to four percent. So for hundreds of millions of dollars that we're gonna spend on reconstructing roadways, this is a very simple addition to those projects. Yes, it's still real money. I'm not downplaying that, but it's cost-benefit of having that permanent infrastructure in there is massive.
Allan Rutter:So let's talk a little bit about one of the things TTI has been doing for about the last year or so is, we helped lead one of three major vehicle to infrastructure grants from Federal Highway. What are the some of the similarities and distinctions in what Cavnue is building in Texas and Michigan and what FHWA and USDOT are thinking about V2X? Are they similar? What's different?
Tyler Duvall:I think we view ourselves as a system integrator to unlock V2X and frankly any communication platform from roadside to vehicle and back. So we are agnostic, we hope V2X takes off. It's a great concept. I've been working on it, effectively, for 20 years, off and on. There's obviously this chicken -and- the- egg problem around equipping vehicles that don't get any information off what you know, why are we putting stuff in a vehicle if nothing's coming into that? So, you know, it costs 300 bucks to add a hardware component to a vehicle that doesn't get any information, an auto manufacturer will say that doesn't make economic sense. So there's a chicken-and-the-egg problem. We view ourselves as actually helping break that problem a little bit because once we provide information off the roadway, whether it's V2 X or cloud-to-cloud communication from our system to a trucking company's cloud platform, all it really is about is latency and accuracy. So, like, how quickly are you getting that information and how accurate and can you trust it? So we are viewing ourselves as the trusted, very high-speed provider of information off the roadway. Hopefully that accelerates V2 X, and TTI definitely is a leader there. But I want to build a company that's dependent on a bunch of other companies making other investments. I want to build a company that delivers benefits today to roadway operators. So whether it's humans, Level 3 vehicles, Level 4, a traffic management center in Austin... all of those people will benefit from having this information.
Allan Rutter:There are a whole bunch of different places we can go with that. Let me focus on the State Highway 130 element. Once the Texas Department of Transportation moved all of its offices to Southeast Austin next to the airport, I found myself using State Highway 130 a lot more.
Tyler Duvall:But for you, yeah [laughter]...
Allan Rutter:Yeah, pay the man. And have noticed an awful lot of construction on the median that's happening, not just adding lanes and those kind of things, but adding equipment. What kind Of features will that do? And how will that help State Highway 130 run the road better? And how will that create an environment in which automated trucks can leverage the kinds of technology that they have on board?
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we want a competitive procurement by the way. It was a coincidence to your comment. Like they basically selected the northern segments of 130, given the increase of truck volumes. Obviously, I knew the quarter very well, but you know, the segment that we're now deploying on is up near Pflugerville, segment two, and it's effectively a four-mile stretch. You go out there for those Texans, you can drive, you'll see poles, you know, every 200 meters, and it will be the most advanced road sensing platform in the world along a stretch of highway in Central Texas. And so what that means is we are turning the power on literally as we speak. I just got off the phone with TxDOT. We're working through some final stages of contractor delivery, but the poles are there, the power, the fiber's there. And effectively, the way TxDOT refers to it is, they built the Christmas tree. We're hanging the lights. So all of our lights are the sensing equipment and the got a basically a mini data center on the roadway around these poles. And what's really gonna happen, Allan, is you're gonna have full visibility for that four-mile stretch over everything happening on 130 with respect to hazards, slow traffic, weaving activity, risks that they're not getting captured right now because they're just not the right insights or eyes on the road. That information could be provided and will be provided to drivers, including trucks, on a look- ahead basis. So eventually we'll have a broadcast through TxDOT itself or directly to the trucking companies to say, hey, you've got a tire four meters into the left lane 3.7 miles ahead. Not the general warnings they get today, many of which are highly inaccurate, just so you know, which says "debris ahead." Like, "debris ahead," if you're going 70 miles an hour as a truck, is not that helpful. You pay a little more attention, but "tire left lane four meters in at this exact spot," that's pretty helpful information, particularly to an advanced vehicle, but obviously to a human.
Tyler Duvall:So initially we're gonna stream it to some humans. We got a number of trucking companies that are gonna partner with us to receive that information. They're gonna pick some of their drivers to test it out. The good thing about the trucking industry, Allan, is that technology on board is accelerated a lot, as you know, a lot of it because of federal regulations. So there's now a data feed, effectively, into the cabin of trucks. And so all you need to do now is just tap that pipe that's already going into the driver around different things, and you just provide better information. One of the concerns with, like, Waze is that you know you've got almost too much interaction. You're asking people to make decisions that, like live, like is this here? Is it like that? It's better than nothing, by the way, significantly better than nothing. But you know, we think this is a step change in information fidelity and accuracy and speed. And I think hopefully it's gonna be the poster child for TxDOT to deploy this. The way I say it is, let's go digitize the triangle. We have this huge opportunity to work with TxDOT in Dallas and Houston as well, to frankly start to digitize this whole network. The analogy I gave recently was you know, Herb Kelleher created Southwest Airlines-- the famous napkin. For those of you who don't know, just Google "Herb Kelleher napkin." You know, he was having some cocktails with a pilot buddy. They started this amazing thing called Southwest Airlines off of a napkin that drew the three cities of Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston. And I was like, our version of that is a digitized napkin. So that's basically what I think we want to do.
Allan Rutter:Well, looking forward to it as it comes online and being able to see some of the products that it produces, having been able to be on board some of the autonomous trucks that are operating on I-45, the amazing amount of vision those things have, far beyond line of sight."
Tyler Duvall:Yeah.
Allan Rutter:Taking advantage of built-in mapping of what those three lanes should look like, and then live traffic as it happens.
Tyler Duvall:Well, so you just hit on something really important, which is I mean, it's incredible what the L4 industry is doing. I mean, you know, obviously Aurora and Kodiak are too, I mean, it's just unbelievable talent. And we view ourselves as basically an accelerant and a risk mitigant to support those activities. Like, you know, they're not building their companies dependent on us, and we don't want them to be.
Tyler Duvall:But to your point, there's so much variability in the roadway environment. Like, work zones get a lot of attention. A slight change in the work zone from Thursday to Friday is a problem around uncertainty associated with look-ahead information. Why is that not being piped immediately to the autonomous truck? Like, we know what the work zone is from the spot of the work zone. And so I feel like this idea that we can help accelerate and de-risk, particularly for the things beyond where they see, and to prevent a lot of the harsh braking, the swerving, the need for like aggressive mitigation, because that aggressive mitigation causes operational problems for everyone else on the road, by the way. So there's... these are interconnected problems with trucks. Texas is obviously way ahead in terms of deploying supporting infrastructure, but we think we could go even further.
Allan Rutter:So talk on some of that automated vehicle thing. Earlier in 2025, the Texas Legislature enacted some additional regulations for automated trucking and robotaxis to allow for driverless operations. Everybody was saying we're going to do it. I think the legislature said, um, we probably want to know a little more than we know now. So they created a structure for that. And like you said, some of these trucks have been operating on Texas highways. What do you see as the near- and long-term feature of autonomous vehicles, both over the road and in urban areas, both near-term and longer term?
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, look, I mean, I think obviously you got three different market segments. You got robo taxis, you got Level 4 trucking, and then you have Level 3 passenger car. Robo taxis is very focused on really transforming urban transportation. I'm in Austin all the time. It's incredible to see, and just so much innovation. Obviously, Tesla's now entering into that game. That's just gonna proliferate. They're gonna get smarter and smarter. You've seen the maps over where you can actually operate these robotaxis, they'll continue to grow incrementally. The compute power... hopefully will costs will come down, LIDAR costs will come down. Obviously, there's a big debate over LIDAR versus machine vision. I'm not gonna pick a horse in that race, but it's great to have multiple bets as an American. It's good to have all those bets being made. So I think it's exciting. I mean, it's really gonna disrupt the Uber and Lyft business models in very exciting ways. I'm not in the camp that everyone's gonna abandon their cars in 10 years, by the way, but that seems a little unlikely knowing Americans; but it's gonna really change travel. It's also gonna change the way we think about the value of time in a vehicle. There have been a lot of bets made around people's willingness to pay for time savings. I don't know how disruptive that is.
Tyler Duvall:If I could be doing this call right now in my robo taxi in Austin, for example, like that's a little bit different. My time is different there. So I think that one seems to be on a great trajectory. Obviously, they'll start to get out onto the limited access highways, but I think the biggest disruption in the next five years is gonna be Level 3 passenger vehicle. All the big OEMs are gonna roll out platforms that basically allow you to drive hands off, eyes off. So it's not a robo taxi, but it's a car that you can sit and we could do this call in that car as well. Those are getting mainlined. Those actually, I think, would really benefit from supportive infrastructure on high-speed roadways because they will disengage if they see something in the roadway, there's a problem on the road. Our initial idea was we can really unlock level three on high-speed corridors like 35 and 130-- 20, 30, 40 mile trips people can take effectively like a train in their vehicle. So I think Level 3 is really exciting. If you just Google Level 3 or "hands off, eyes off, " you'll see every manufacturer making announcements about that.
Tyler Duvall:And then Level 4 trucking, it's gonna change everything about the supply chain long term. It's taking a long time, obviously, to get the full driver out, just given some of the constraints. But I have no doubt the technology is there and it's gonna get deployed broadly. The real big policy question, putting our old hats back on, Allan, is, how do we deal with this massive geographic disparity between where this trucking is available and not? So as of right now, there are not any plans, I don't think, to deploy this north of Oklahoma. And they'll probably spend the next three to five years focused almost entirely on Texas. But what does that mean? I don't know. Like what happens to, you know, Michigan's economy if, you know, all the trucking in Texas is autonomous and none of it is in Michigan. Like, I don't know. Like, it's these are big questions that are not fully answered.
Allan Rutter:So well, and to be fair, there are all kinds of reasons why that's being experimented on in Texas.
Tyler Duvall:Yeah.
Allan Rutter:Part of it is a legislative framework that is fairly open. Part of it is we don't have a whole lot of ice and snow. Weather conditions are pretty good, the roadway conditions themselves are pretty good, relatively modest grades. I can understand why they would choose some of the lanes that they are. As they make some progress in that, the next steps, and maybe this is one of the things that the I-94 project will help people think through is as different weather conditions in the rest of the part of the country that you have to operate trucking through all the time because everybody wants their stuff all the time, that's gonna help push those Level 4s into environments that they're not in right now.
Tyler Duvall:Exactly. No, and I think that's great. And by the way, our view is, our technology platform can help spread the wealth, so to speak, of autonomy faster. One of the projects that we have now going is in Georgia, coming out of the port of Savannah. There's a drayage route called Dean Forest Road. That's about a six-mile connector route from the port of Savannah to I-16. I-16 is, I think, the fastest growing distribution quarter in the United States. Hyundai's North American operation and plants are there, massive facilities from Maersk and Amazon. So that six-mile stretch is a perfect drayage route. Now, there's signals, it's kind of a mess. There are 5,000 trucks a day going on this little road. And so this is a new kind of deployment, but I do think automation into those first mile/ last mile environments is right around the corner. It feels very solvable given current technology. So we're going to help GDOT pioneer some stuff there next year.
Allan Rutter:So Georgia, Texas, and Florida, and Virginia have been states that have been, probably over that last 20 years of both of our careers, a lot more assertive on public-private partnerships or P3s.
Tyler Duvall:Yeah.
Allan Rutter:What benefits come from P3 both development, from project delivery and from financing?
Tyler Duvall:Yeah. So look, I mean, we've had multiple iterations of the P3 movement in the U.S. As you said, like when we were in government, 85% of the P3 deals were Texas and Virginia. And we built out a whole road system in Dallas and Houston and Austin and Northern Virginia, where I live. I can literally get from any spot from Alexandria, Virginia, to Dulles Airport to downtown with an express lane now. I mean, it's incredible, it's transformed Northern Virginia. People don't even realize it. Maryland, unfortunately, has not done any of these. I grew up in Maryland and we didn't do any of those. Virginia now has door-to-door 30 miles, 30 minutes every day in the most congested driver market in the country. People don't even realize through the unlock of economic value that's happened there. It's similar to Dallas, right? So they've changed the world, those kinds of public-private partnerships.
Tyler Duvall:Obviously, the ability to efficiently deliver infrastructure, to price it, to design it, to have this tension between design, build, operate, and maintain. These are all trade-offs. When you bid out a project that's designed, bid, built, operation, maintain, you lose some of that integration fight. Obviously, that delivers projects too. I'm not saying that's not a way to deliver, but there are benefits associated with integrating a design that's Cadillac, for example, that costs more money to operate and maintain or to finance. That's that's not something you want to do. You want tension there, whether the government imposes that tension through its own process or through a P3-- lots of debates on that. Obviously, I was a big proponent of the country pushing forward experimentation of that, Allan. And I think I think it's shown that it did a lot. Now, obviously, there's been a backlash in a number of states. My own interest increasingly, though, is new kinds of partnership. I think we've solved a way to procure a big P3. If Texas wanted to do it, they could do it. Georgia just did the largest P3 ever done, in Atlanta. Nashville and Tennessee are about to do five of them. So if you want to do it, it's great. There's a whole model now to do it.
Tyler Duvall:I'm really interested in the services side of it, the operation side. And I think what we need to develop is a new kind of P3 around advanced technology services in operations. And so, you know, I have a bit of a vision for like a 10- to 15- year relationship, performance-based. So TxDOT-- which by the way, in our RFP that they put out-- laid out all these KPIs for what the system has to do. So you tell the private sector, this is what I want in terms of accuracy, latency, performance. Put that out, let the private sector figure it out, and then the services fee effectively is tied to whether the system performs and achieves outcomes. And if that was a 10- to 15- year contract, Allan, you could finance hundreds or thousands of miles of roadway. That promise from TxDOT or FDOT or VDOT to say we will pay for these high-speed, high-risk quarters to get outfitted with tech, you got to deliver, that's a scalable concept. We've never done P3s like that in the U.S., but I'm pretty bullish on it. And I think we're cheap. Like, our cost relative to reconstructing roadways is a lot cheaper. So that's one of my big conversations with state leaders is, think about procurement of technology and using, you know, it doesn't need to be a 50-year P3, but it needs to be substantial enough to unlock the capital benefits.
Allan Rutter:So that gets us to my final question, which is to talk about what we look forward to in a surface transportation bill. The current one we have is expiring next September. The Infrastructure Jobs Act that we have now was one of the only surface transportation authorizations that actually happened without multiple extensions. September 2026, two months in advance of a mid-year, midterm election. I'm not sure that gets done. But as we think about what that looks like, if someone were to give you a fully functioning Harry Potter -style wand, where you could have three whacks at it, what three things would you like to see in a surface transportation bill?
Tyler Duvall:Yeah, I think number one is just, you know, we've done NEPA delegation, and that's worked extremely well, where states have assumed control of the environmental process, obviously subject to some federal oversight, but really driving that day-to-day. That is applicable to the whole program, in my view. I think we're at a point where states have built up their own mechanisms to deliver projects, procure them, environmentally regulate them. The federal government, in my view, has gotten way too much into the process and oversight game without really focusing on outcomes. I always say to people like, a state DOT could put forward a plan that says we're going to repave the exact same road with all of our federal money over and over and over again. That's our plan. That's what we want to do.
Tyler Duvall:The only federal question around that would be have you gone through the 680 steps required by us to make sure that you do that the right way? We put out a framework for a bill at the end of the Bush Administration, really about a new platform concept for restructuring the federal state partnership around performance. So, my own view, the number one idea would be to block rent all of the funding, put in place a performance program, delegate all of the regulatory pre-construction stuff to states, assuming they have processes in place to do that, and ask the big fundamental questions, which is, Are we driving performance outcomes? Are we focused on efficiency, cost, project delivery, safety, congestion, and environmental questions? Like, are we doing that? Is this program moving the needle? It's a big investment for the federal government to never ask any questions about what are we doing with the money, other than are you complying with these 40 requirements? And so I feel like that would be number one, Allan would be to move it into a performance-based block grant concept. You know, I do think the southeastern states, GDOT, VDOT, Tennessee, Texas, and Florida, and North Carolina have driven a lot of that innovation in the last 10 years, but others are just as hungry to do that. So I feel like, you know, maybe it's a five-state program, maybe it's two, maybe it's everybody, but we always have to start small. So that would be number one.
Tyler Duvall:I think number two would really be around the financing of these projects. Obviously, the TIFIA program, I think, has been incredible accelerant, but we need to broaden this idea of financing. Like this whole idea of CapEx versus OpEx, you know, I'll always remember the blueprint you developed for the Amtrak reform bill, with Michael around the federal role in CapEx versus OpEx. My own world is technology now, but, like, there's a lot of CapEx that should be financed through mechanisms. We can call it a bank or whatever you want to call it, but it's just a basic question of how do we finance things that are long-lasting assets, whether you know 10 plus years. And I feel like we should reorient away from TIFIA just doing these massive like multi-billion dollar roadway improvements or transit projects to accelerating operational deployments that are capital expenditures that are at the heart of it. So that would be number two was to programmatically reform how we focus on that. For example, TxDOT said, hey, we want to outfit 250 miles in all of our metro areas with a new technology platform. The federal government should be immediately talking about how to financially do that faster, cheaper, more efficiently through the TIFIA program or whatever program you want to call it. And I guess third would really be safety, really developing a standard for what a smart road is. And again, these are biased answers, Allan, I'm giving you but but we don't have a standard. Our view is like maybe we steal the autonomy levels, but you know, a Level 4 roadway in Dallas or in Austin coming into and out of the city, that's high- risk, high- speed, lots of chaos. That needs more attention as a problem area than Midland, Texas, does. And I feel like we should have standards of safety. And frankly, what do we want out of our operating systems on those roadways tied to those operating environments? And at a minimum, I feel like the Fed should get into that game and say we want to see more level four roadways in our metro areas and we'll help fund them.
Allan Rutter:Any three of those we could spend another couple of podcasts on. But to close out, this does not surprise me knowing you, Tyler. I think our listeners can tell about your passion for making transportation work. One of the things we ask all of our guests is what are some of the reasons that motivate you to do what you do every day?
Tyler Duvall:It's funny. So I came into transportation, as I said earlier, having started on another career path and concluded that that career path was probably not the right one for me. And I went in with kind of open eyes and I just, like, fell in love with the problem, in everything. I worked on aviation stuff, I was like, it's just a mix of really challenging topics. But the thing that I love about it is it's solvable. Like I one of the things I used to always say is, I think transportation is the most solvable big problem. You know, education is really hard, health care is really hard. Some of these others... housing can be pretty hard. Like, but transportation, like honestly, you know, well-meaning people on both sides of the aisle sitting in a room, and back to the commission questions, will align, I think, on 80 to 90 percent of the things we should do to solve these problems. Like, we need more technology, we need better quality roadways, we need safer roadways. By the way, we need more pricing of roadways and price signals to customers. Maybe not 80% agree there, but that one seems pretty foundational. These are solvable big hairy problems. And I see the effects of not solving them every day. I mean, the lives lost, I mean, it's a tragedy that we tolerate that. I find it insane that as a country we accept 40,000 people dying. Yes, there are a lot of factors, and it's not easy to solve overnight. I'm not saying that's easy overnight, but like we can do a lot more there. It's crazy to me that we tolerate just complete collapses in performance in our major cities every day. At least to lose my mind.
Tyler Duvall:I'm like, you know, we had a few member and we were in government, I can't remember if you were still there, but there was a brownout, basically a rolling brownout in New York City with electricity, and people acted like it was doomsday. It was all hands on deck. This can never happen again. One day of that happened with electricity. I'm, like, that's every day. I just flew from New York, it was an hour and a half to get from Midtown to Kennedy Airport. I missed my flight. And I was like, everyone just sitting. It's like, what are we doing? This is solvable. Like, you know, electricity moves, other, you know, railroads things move through networks. They move because they operate them efficiently and they price them and they manage the capacity. The fact that we don't do that, and I sit in traffic, I'm like, what are we doing? Emil and I used to always joke about the fact that they say traffic and weather at the same time in the local radio broadcast or TV broadcasts, as if they were both equally unsolvable. Like the weather is what it is and the traffic is what it is. And it's just always been, like, no, that's not true. That's a policy choice that we've made to effectively allow those conditions to persist. We can address them, we can mitigate them, we can do stuff about them. Again, my frustration with how easily solvable it is kind of is matched now with my job. And so that's a great way to come together.
Allan Rutter:Well, Tyler, I really appreciate you setting some time for us today. Thanks for joining our podcast.
Tyler Duvall:Oh, Allan, thanks so much. Always love talking to you. I wanted to hear more from you, by the way. So we should... I want to reverse it next time.
Allan Rutter:I am so grateful that Tyler was able to describe the innovative work Cavnue is deploying in Texas to accelerate the connections between infrastructure and smarter vehicles. Texas is the epicenter of this kind of transportation innovation, also exemplified in TTI's leadership of the federally funded Transforming Roads Unleashing Smart Technologies, or TRUST project, a partnership with TxDOT, local governments, and a consortium of private companies. We'll include a link to the project page in our episode's show notes.
Allan Rutter:Thanks for listening. If you liked what you heard or learned something, please take just a minute to give us a review, subscribe, and share this episode. I invite you to join us next time for another conversation about getting ourselves and the stuff we need from point A to point B. Thinking Transportation is a production of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, a member of The Texas A&M University System. The show is edited and produced by Chris Pourteau. I'm your host, Allan Rutter. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you next time.