Driving into the Future: How Technology is Transforming Transport with Darren Capes

Dave Atkinson

:: 00:20

Afternoon everyone.

Today, I'm welcoming onto the podcast royalty of Transport Technology, a really good friend and a really excellent proponent and promoter of technology, artificial intelligence, transport and all-around good guy. Darren and I share the fact that our first local government assignment was for Humberside County Council. Not together, but in different parts.

So, I was in the archaeology unit as a sick farmer. Darren, just remind me what your first role at Cumberside was.

Darren Capes

:: 01:06

Thank you, Dave. Well, thank you for that, for that introduction. Royalty, that's something I don't get called every year.

a training technician back in: 1986

So I was one of those lucky people that did something that nobody seems to do nowadays, which is I got taken on by Humberside to basically not doing anything for four years other than spend time in all the parts of the Technical Services Directorate, get an HNC and then come out at the end as a fully rounded technician. And it was a great introduction to the world of work and it's something that sadly very few organisations do these days.

Dave Atkinson

:: 01:42

Brilliant. And where did the transport bit and that your interest in transport come in then? Where, where, where did that come in?

Darren Capes

:: 01:51

Yeah, I'm not really sure to be honest.

So as a training technician you did all, you did everything, you did everything from street lighting, waste disposal, I even worked in the materials laboratory and I spent, but I spent the majority of my time in, in, in road design and, and actually I, I imagined at the time that I would, I would come out and be a road designer.

And this is back in the 80s when authorities like Humbersad were still building lots of roads, lots of bypasses, lots of industrial access roads, that kind of thing. And I kind of figured that's where my life would be until I went and spent the very last placement of the four years in transportation.

And that was about transport planning and that's kind of where it went from there really. And actually, and maybe we'll come on to in a few minutes, my actual conversion into technology was a bit later than that.

And as I left the transport, as I left the technology, the training technician program at Humberside, I thought my Future would be as a transport planner.

Dave Atkinson

:: 02:44

It interesting you should say that. I've worked with a number of people over the years who were both sort of lifers in the public sector, aren't we?

Whether it's national, regional, local government. I've worked with a lot of people and a lot of people describe themselves as innovators or visionaries.

first time in the sort of mid: 2000

But you had that really good ability of joining us from where we are today to where you'd kind of envisaged us in sort of five to 10 years. So is that sort of. How did that come around? Was that part of your journey into transport technology as well?

Or is that just like having, just like having good ideas and liking following them through?

Darren Capes

:: 04:13

It kind of was. Thank you for that praise. I almost recognized myself in there somewhere. Yeah. So I spent my career at Humberside.

After being a technician, I suspended, spent it as a transport planner and I went on to do that a couple of other authorities and the way that Humberside arranged that, it was quite a pragmatic calling.

So it was about transport economics and road design and scheme selection, but there's quite a lot of practical designing stuff and implementing stuff.

hen when I arrived at York in: 2000

So it was a really top quality little unit and I, I turned up, I, and I didn't really fit there and I didn't realize until I got that didn't fit because their approach to transport planning was much more academic.

It was much more of an academic exercise that suited people maybe with a more sort of sort of geography arts background than a civil engineer like me. And I quite quickly realized I, I could do the job but I was a bit of a square pegging around hole really.

So I kind of drifted into doing the kind of more of the scheme delivery and I was really lucky to get asked to do Something called the UTMC development program.

So utmc, the Urban Traffic Management and Control Program, was a government program that York had won to deliver cutting edge technology to link equipment together.

And as this slightly square pegging around hole and not proper transport planner in York's eyes, I was kind of asked to go off and do that and run this technology program. And that's really when I kind of got the bug.

And that's really when I kind of, you know, if I do recognize anything you just said about me, that's kind of when it came to the fore really.

And I was able to, you know, take this quite nebulous new emerging technology delivery program and match it against the kind of things that York wanted to do and think it through and think how it was all going to work and be delivered. And that's, that's kind of, you know, that was the moment that my career sort of, sort of, sort of set itself on the path it is now, really.

So yeah, it was all fairly accidental. And as I've grown older I've become a big believer in serendipity and actually in the duck.

I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone over sweat thinking what their next 20 years of career might be because stuff happens and as long as you're ready to react to it, then that's probably as good a way as any working out where you're going to be, I think.

Dave Atkinson

:: 06:37

Yeah. How did you sort of navigate around the kind of barriers, your sort of management permissions, stuff like that in the early days?

How did you get yourself? Because, you know, I heard stories of, you know, very sort of Janet and John arrangements, but for the right reasons to do, to do a job.

Cables joining servers, joining screens.

Darren Capes

:: 07:08

Yeah, we did all sorts of stuff. When we put the first verbal message signs in York, I actually went to B and Q on Sunday and bought the tools we would use to maintain them.

I mean, we were that sort of operation, you know, we, we did stuff like that. And yeah, you know, we, we cruised stuff together and built servers and ran weird bits of software and that's what we did.

And on the one hand, you know, it was great to be left to learn to be able to do that.

But on the other hand, and this is something that sort of served me throughout my career, it's thinking that, it's understanding that most people in work are there to do a job and we're all there to try and do the right thing.

But if you're engineer or a procurement officer or you work in committee services or whatever, you do, your idea of a good job is fundamentally going to be different. And so my job as a technology program manager is to make sure that I'm selling the thing I want to do in terms of other people understand.

So start stamping your feet and demanding that everyone understands the engineering reason why you need to do something is not going to get you anywhere. The way to get where you want to go, to understand other people's position and to work with them.

And as an engineer throughout my career, procurement is a good example where people say, procurement is a blocker. They never do what I want to do.

Well, yeah, if you go to procurement a week before you want to buy something and tell them you want to buy it, that will happen.

If you go to procurement 18 months before you want to buy something and get them on site and get them to understand why you're doing it and how it fits into wider policies, then it will happen.

And that, I think, has been the key, really, has been trying to understand the bigger thing that you want to do, then understand other people's perspectives and try and work with them to deliver that.

Dave Atkinson

:: 08:45

Brilliant.

Darren Capes

:: 08:45

So one of my favorite.

One of my favorite stories, and I can't say as an engineer, I can say this is one of my favorite definitions of an engineer, is someone that knows everything about what he's doing, apart from why he's doing it.

Dave Atkinson

:: 08:56

Yeah.

Darren Capes

:: 08:57

And I've always tried to avoid that.

I've always tried to avoid that and understand why, in a wider sense, we're trying to deliver what we're trying to deliver, not just because it's, in an engineering term, the right thing to do.

Dave Atkinson

:: 09:09

So moving forward, then, to Eber Arkham and the STEP project, I'll. I'll let you get into. Get into that a little bit more yourself, since they're. They. They were your babies, really. And then you stepped forward into.

Because then you started to connect much more with national government. And then obviously you moved into the role that you're in now. So just, just walk us through, through that point.

And what was the sort of originator for Ian? Because that's the things where, where we start to get into AI, isn't it a little bit? Yeah, Yeah.

Darren Capes

:: 09:50

I think it goes back to that point about serendipity again. And I was really lucky to end up in York. And I could have gone anywhere, but I was really, really lucky to end up in York.

There was an authority that was interested in doing stuff and interested in being innovative. It had politicians of many different colors over the years, worked with many different politicians.

But there was almost unswervingly a belief in technology and belief in trying to invest in the future, which I think you don't find in a lot of authorities. And I think that's true of management as well. And I absolutely include you as part of that.

I had an incredible set of managers in my time at York who just to a certain degree trusted me to get on and do stuff and deliver stuff and understand that even if they didn't quite understand what I was saying or what was happening here, it was probably going to be the right thing.

That gave me a huge amount of freedom and a freedom that I know that a lot of other engineers in local authority, equally capable engineers never get. And I'm absolutely grateful for that.

But that allowed us in York to start to do some quite clever stuff and it's allowed us with quite small amounts of money to go off and do some fairly innovative things and innovative things about how we link systems together and how we user technology in the city and the kind of technology story we were able to tell and we were able to win some fairly small pieces of government funding for that.

And I think the other thing with York is because it clearly had that kind of attitude to technology, because I was able to do that, I was able to attract innovators and other people from around the country, people from the private sector, people working in academia to come and work with us.

It felt like an authority that would probably deliver on its promises in terms of research that has allowed us to put projects like Eboracum together, which is a fairly small scale project to on a single corridor show that technology could enhance the way that we optimized traffic. And we were able to get a bit of government money to do that.

And we delivered a project and is often the way it was part of a project where the government funded 15 or 20 different projects around England. And York was the only one that really delivered. Because one of the things I am really keen on is that he should always deliver. He said do something.

And as people that work with me know, I absolutely will never.

My budgets will never have an underspend at the end of the year, for example, because we will do stuff, we'll buy, we'll spend the money and we'll do stuff. And it's the same if you get research money, if you get government funding, just spend it, do something, make something work.

You know, that's much better than procrastination is actually doing something. And an we got that, we got that kind of sort of gloss of an authority that would deliver that. And it also allowed me to.

We started to think then a bit more about what the next generation of traffic management could be. And we started to think primarily about the link between vehicles and infrastructure.

Even in: 2012

And once that happens, you can move away from the traditional model of how you manage traffic, which is that you have a very complex, very computationally rich infrastructure that manages completely random metal boxes about which it knows nothing. They just randomly move around the network and you try and react to what they're doing and manage traffic.

And that's kind of where we've been ever since the start of Traffic Manager, because vehicles fundamentally were random metal boxes that behaved in their own way.

And it was clear that the future wasn't too far ahead where that would change, where actually the ability for vehicles and infrastructure to talk to each other, where the ability for the some of that computational requirement to be devolved into the vehicle wasn't too far away. And Iber AKAM was the start of that.

Starting to think about green light priorities, starting to think about using floating vehicle data, using other data sources to actually understand what these metal boxes are doing and treat them as a bit of a less of a random effect. It made me think, well, actually, that's really where the future is. The future is in connectivity.

The future is building systems that can use that and from there flows everything else.

So the use of machine learning and AI data fusion, the building of digital twins, all the other things that we're thinking about now flow from the fact that if you have a two way connection with the vehicles that allows you to do traffic management proactively rather than reactively, then the world changes. STEP was an example. STEP was an example of trying to think that through. So Eboracum was a project.

We picked Eboracum because it's the Roman name for York and projects have to have a name that means nothing. So we picked that one Step. Slightly different. With Step, we Step.

Dave Atkinson

:: 14:30

Apologies for interrupting. Just remind me, did you not have a name for STEP as well? That was also historic. I forgot. I'd say what apology if you can.

Darren Capes

:: 14:45

No, we. No, we did. And it wasn't Step.

We had a project, we run a separate project where we put sensing equipment on bin lorries to be able to sense road condition Actually, that's now something that you can buy. If you go to companies like Z or Gas, they will sell you technology that does that. But we did it as a, a technology demonstrator over 10 years ago.

Now it'll be called that Pergamentum, which I think, yeah, that's a Roman name for rubbish or something. So we had Project Pergamentum.

Dave Atkinson

:: 15:14

So I'd misremembered. Sorry, go on, go on.

Darren Capes

:: 15:17

We had a couple of other names that were slightly more contentious that we never used, but I'd love to have done. But yeah, STEP was the Smart Travel Evolution program.

And that was an attempt to think, okay, well, if we could do this, if we could bring in data from different sources and mash it together and get good outputs from that, then we need a structure to do that. We can't just, you know, the sticky step, tape and string approach to technology is great.

And like you said, and I said, we did a lot of stuff and all our early work was like that. But you can't build systems like that. You've got to do it in a more ordered way. So STEP was started as a structure that thought about data sources.

It thought about how you'd collect them, how you would clean and moderate them, how you would then process them and then what end services you deliver doing that.

And STEP was the time when, and again going back to this point before, about selling the bigger picture, not just talking about technology, Step was the point when we started to think about, it's not just about the technology, it's about what services you can deliver. Can you deliver better access for pedestrians, better public transport? Can you improve the way we maintain our roads?

Can you provide quicker journeys? Less, less. Less congestion, less. Better air quality? All these. Can you do all these?

Can you deliver services that deliver these types of things and can you do it in an orderly way? Now, just to slightly divert, this was about the time when Europe was starting to think about connected technology as well.

And Europe had produced a whole series of what it called use cases. And these again were policy things, services you should be able to deliver to the public using technology.

So we thought, let's build a model that kind of takes what we know from Eboracum and all this data we know we can collect thinks about the services framed in a wider European sense. So we're doing things that the rest of the world will understand.

And then let's work out what the plumbing between those two points needs to look like to be able to deliver a citywide service. And we Put that pro forward. You put that forward to the government.

We put that forward as a, as a development scheme into quite a large program that was funding lots of authorities to go do things like build roundabouts and widen roads and build bits of dual carriageway. And we put in a purely technology solution. STEP had no symbols at all, it was purely technology.

And we won, we won 3 million pounds, which was a huge amount of money for technology in any way.

And certainly the city, the size of York was a real opportunity and it was the only, and to this day it still is, it's from that funding stream, it's the only purely technology solution government's accepted.

So we were the only people ever to prove to government actually we could probably deal with congestion using ones and notes rather than using concrete and tarmac. And I think we did, I think for what's been delivered in York, I think that absolutely was the case.

Dave Atkinson

:: 18:04

So let's just unpick that a little bit then. So what tech is in the boxing step. So we're talking, talking real time modeling, decision making on street sensors. Just.

Could you expand a bit on that, please?

Darren Capes

:: 18:26

That's right. So, yeah, you've kind of, you've got it there.

So the key to Step, and as with a lot of these things, it's about timeliness and STEP came along at the point when some of these things that were thought about for a long while were actually feasible. So Step is the, was the idea is if you, if you could collect data in real time from things that we know we could collect.

So we know we could collect it from buses. We've been doing it for 15 years. We know that companies like Inrix and TomTom can provide real time data because that's what they do.

We know there's a, there are a number of sources we can collect data from.

If you can, if you can, if you can collect that and order it into a model, and if you can spin that model at full speed or even faster than real time, if you can spin that model ahead of time, then you can actually make decisions and you can actually provide outputs for things that you see now that predict what's going to happen in the future, and I mean the short term future.

So you can do things like you can say, well, actually, you know, it's coming up to the evening peak traffic appears to be behaving in a particular way today. That, that means by what we've seen in the past, by being able to model what we see today against what we've seen in the past.

We know that the following interventions are probably worthwhile so we can deliver interventions into services that people want, whether that's managing traffic, buses, whatever, based on that data. And that's what STEP did. And that is what we would now call a digital twin.

And we didn't at the time, we didn't really have that name, but it was about saying if we could harness very good computers to build an accurate enough model of the city to allow us to determine outputs, if we can do that, populate it with data, clean data, data that's in the right format, et cetera, so we can do that and then spin that model quickly, we can probably use that to proactively manage the network. And that's what STEP really did.

And yeah, so that used the things like that used fast computing and cloud computing, it used services that you'd buy from companies like PTV and Amesun and others that build these models. But it also relied on the coming of in vehicle services.

So it relied on the fact that the Glosser green light advice, the ability to put messages into vehicles about when signals will turn to green is a thing you can do that now in vehicle messaging, the ability to put other messaging into a vehicle about roadworks and diversions and that kind of thing is possible. Vehicles have that capability in them.

It relied on the fact that the next generation of the core software that used to manage cities, the so called UTC software that manages how traffic signals operate, the next generations, the generations we're seeing coming out now in systems like my city Infusion is capable of taking inputs that allow it to influence traffic in those ways.

So it collected together a lot of things that we're sort of seeing and built a model that should be manageable and sustainable for a city the size of York to actually run. And nothing we did is things that places like London and Tokyo and others haven't been doing for a few years.

But to scale that to a level where it works in a city like York, not a city like London, is a challenge. And that's really one of the things that we achieved.

Dave Atkinson

:: 21:31

Yeah, and, and so we've talked a bit about vehicle to infrastructure, but obviously we've also got the motor manufacturers are developing a lot of vehicle to vehicle and the, the reason I say that is, is it it dawned on me driving on the M1 yesterday back home from the Midlands where I work back to East Yorkshire, I was on the, where they're doing all the emergency recovery bays along the M1 with an average speed camera enforcement at 50 miles an hour. So everybody's largely doing 50 miles an hour, but actually nobody's exactly going at the same speed.

And there's that issue, isn't there, where, you know, my speedometer might not reflect what the next. And then somebody might. And it just dawned on me at the time that if there was, it might not be the term. I'll call it a hive approach.

So that each of the car had had a mind and they all worked together, they all knew the origin and the destination. That would increase efficiency, wouldn't it? I mean, so what's your sort of view on.

Because I know that when we talked to motor vehicle manufacturers, there was a view about, do you need the infrastructure? But if you've got vehicle to vehicle. So just tell us a bit about the differences and the nuances of that.

Darren Capes

:: 23:08

Okay, so, yeah, it is an important point. So V2I, vehicle to infrastructure and V2V vehicle to vehicle are all part of a ecosystem that's developing called V2X, vehicle to X to everything.

And there are two different parts of that and they're developing in different ways and with different impetuses. So V2V is something that vehicle manufacturers are probably going to do themselves, I think.

If you look at the world we live in now, when was the last time you saw a car advert that told you how many valves the car had, or whether it had a turbo or not, or even what the size of the engine was? That's not what sells cars these days. Nobody cares.

ike me, whose first car was a: 1982

And increasingly, as we move to EV and those kind of technologically, the mechanical differences between the vehicles becomes less. Less important. That will be the case. So manufacturers for a few years now have been wrestling with this.

How do I make people buy my car rather than somebody else's car if nobody cares that it's two litres and it's got a turbo? And the services you provide in the vehicle are key to that. We've all seen that.

So we've all seen the quality of the stereo in the car, the quality of the information you get in the vehicle, the sat nav, all the other types of things have improved massively over the last 10 years. Manufacturers see that vehicle to vehicle is part of that part to be able to sell a safer vehicle.

They also realize that and they know because we're seeing it already that they will be mandated by Europe.

And Europe, the European Commission is very keen that as technology increases in vehicles, we should move to a situation where vehicles become almost uncrashable.

And they're not willing to allow manufacturers to put lots of technology into vehicles and ignore that basic point that the technology potentially makes vehicles safer. So the European Commission are steadily introducing more and more legislation to ensure that that happens. And that's happened in small ways.

So 15 years ago, having tire pressure warning systems built into a vehicle was something that you got on high level Mercedes. Now it's mandated all vehicles have tire pressure warning systems. There's lots of other systems that do that and Europe is kind of doing that.

As technology becomes prevalent, it mandates it. So the manufacturers know they are on a path towards increasingly connected vehicles. They know this is coming.

They know that what we see now is advanced, which are things like adaptive cruise control and emergency braking and lane keeping. And all these types of things are going to morph into systems that allow vehicles to talk to vehicles.

And the technology to do that is already there, the technology to do at scale.

So the technology to, for example, be told automatically over air that the vehicle, four vehicles in front of you has just started to make an emergency stop. That's doable now. And there are vehicles that can do that.

So again, you potentially deal with these sort of shunt accidents because the vehicles all react to each other. That kind of very localized vehicle to vehicle comms is absolutely doable.

Now, the hive kind of thing, which is where everyone wants to get to, is immensely complicated and there are immense challenges about doing that. I mean, and again, you've only got to see how many vehicles are on the M1. You've already got to see the different types of vehicles.

It's, it's potentially doable.

And you could imagine a situation, you know, Heathrow Airport do it, they manage flights on, you know, coming to Heathrow, the manage planes on the ground, you know, where everything is, everything's coordinated. A lot of that is now done automatically. It's not done by control room, by control tower staff.

Transposing that to the road network is immensely complicated and probably quite a long way off. But the first seeds of that, the first feeds of vehicle to vehicle are coming and will continue to come.

And I think we'll see more and more of that because Europe will push for it and the manufacturers, always wanting to be one ahead of everyone else, will be pushing for it as well.

If you speak to some of the very high Tech companies like Google and Tesla and others who do really intend to get us to fully automated vehicles as quickly as we can, they will tell you that's enough.

They will say that in a few years we will have vehicles that can sense so they can detect the road around them, they can read road signs, they can identify pedestrians and cyclists, they can speak to each other. They will tell you that's enough. And once we have a fleet of vehicles like that, then that will be self regulating.

To me that's a dystopian future, not a utopian future. Because it's absolutely important that the public road network is maintained for the use of the public.

ighways act right back to the: 1870

I want it decided here. I want the politicians that I let locally to think about transport, to be able to pull the levers that manage transport.

So I think the future that we want is one where we also have V2i, we have vehicle to infrastructure and the vehicles don't fully sense their surroundings. They collect data about their surroundings from the source that it should be coming from, which is the highway authority.

I don't want vehicles trying to work out by reading road signs where the speed limits are. I want them to collect that data digitally from the local council, because it's the local council that set the speed limit.

I don't want vehicles kind of somehow inferring by sort of hive knowledge that the A14 might be closed because of roadworks. I want them to collect that data from a database that describes roadworks and a lot of other things like that.

So the future is going to be a mixture of V2I and V2V.

The very fast, very high speed, very low latency things that a vehicle needs to do, like understand right now that the vehicle in front of it has made an emergency brake application. I have no interest in that. The manufacturers will sort that out. They will work all out through the international standards.

Don't care the parts of the vehicle, the parts of the vehicle journey that require it to understand the infrastructure I do care about because that's where the vehicle should be, using data from the public sector to understand its surroundings, not trying to infer it itself. And the challenge there, and the vehicle manufacturers are not necessarily against that idea.

Their view at the moment is, well, that data is not there.

And the challenge for the public sector is to make sure it is there, make sure we are digitizing our services and the information that we hold that make sure that we are providing data that's realistic and reliable, that we are providing data that's useful and actually does make journeys better.

And if we can get to that position, then there is no reason to assume that the future won't be a mixture of V2I and V2V as part of this bigger ecosystem.

Dave Atkinson

:: 29:57

I'm really pleased you talked about it as a dystopian, quite dull, 1984 style procession of vehicles down the M1, because it certainly felt like that to me when I was driving, driving the other night.

But what I was just going to quickly get into, and I'll give my view first, is if systems get more intelligent and the thing that you've described we don't want to see or would not be compatible for a number of years with how people want to use the public realm and things like that.

If we had technology improved, the intelligence of the systems improved, what, what is the future for a driver, you know, that, that does the driver not then become the weak link in the ecosystem, the human actor?

And the reason I wanted to explore that is because AI will is about or in a lot of the narrative around it, it's about existential things, particularly impact on humans. So what's your, you know, and I mean really at a practical level, it's about your insurance premiums, isn't it?

If you're the least safe thing on the road, your insurance premium premium is going to increase.

I know there's loaded things in this around, you know, around liability and if I'm controlling thing something completely or partially or not at all, where am I liable in that? So I've said quite a few things there, Darren, if you could unpack some of that.

So I guess to start with, what's your view on, you know, if technology advances such that we're on the edge, what's the role of the driver?

Darren Capes

:: 31:54

Interesting question, isn't it? What do you want the role of the driver to be?

I mean, if I was driving up the M1 at 50 miles an hour, I would be quite happy to give control to the vehicle.

Dave Atkinson

:: 32:03

Absolutely. That's what I thought. Yeah.

Darren Capes

:: 32:07

On a warm Sunday morning when I'm on a quiet road in a great car, do I want that to drive it? No, I want to drive it myself. Of course I do.

Dave Atkinson

:: 32:15

Absolutely.

Darren Capes

:: 32:17

So there is a kind of consumer question here. About what do we want? Naturally, I love driving, but 80% of the driving I do, I would quite happily let the vehicle get on and do it itself.

So, yeah, there isn't a number of questions there, so let's try and take them in order. So can you have automated vehicles on the road at the moment and can you ensure them? Well, no, but you nearly can, because traditionally you can't.

Traditionally, vehicles have to be driven by a person. Somebody has to be liable for the operation of that vehicle.

The UK has just introduced an AV act, or Automated Vehicles act, which just got through before the general election, which allows for that to start to happen, because across the world it's recognized that the move towards autonomy has been chilled by the fact that they aren't compatible with traditional highway legislation. So we have introduced in this country an AV act, which will start to allow automated vehicles and we'll start to redevelop that.

It's particularly on insurance, that understanding of liability and control in a road vehicle.

And we're one of the first countries in the world to do that, which is potentially huge for us because it potentially puts us right at the front of developing AVs. I think there's another question here about. About. Well, not. Not a question. There's a statement here that this won't be a binary thing.

You won't have a fully, fully manual control vehicle today and a fully automatic vehicle tomorrow. What you will see is an increasing use of vehicle control systems. And we're seeing that already.

You know, you know, you know, if you have a new vehicle, if you, if you're looking to. To buy a new car, if you hire a new car, it, it has, as we said before, it has lane assist, it has.

Has cruise control that adapts to the speed of the vehicles around you. It has all these other technologies and that will increase.

And we will increasingly see vehicles that are able to first be autonomous in a way that allows them to take control from you when they need to do that, and then secondly, beyond that, automate the mundane elements of driving more. And there are some interesting drivers behind this. So the UK has traditionally done very well at road safety.

And from the: 1930

In the UK, and that was because we were very good at continually engineering the roads to be safer, better lit, better signed, better surfacing, better drainage, all the dealing with sharp corners and all these other kind of things we've done for years and years and through legislation and technology advancement. Vehicles have become increasingly safe over the years, to the point where we've started to see a plateau.

We've probably engineered the roads and the vehicles to the max, to the maximum level of safety they can be, whilst you still have a human driving them. And so road safety casualties haven't been dropping much over the recent years.

They've kind of plateaued and we, we still have too many, we still have too many injuries and deaths on the UK roads. The way to stop that, the way to get out of that plateau and to get the graph to start to drop again is through technology.

The way we will see increasingly safe roads now isn't through better engineering, because that's pretty much where it is. Where it is. It's through increased technology, it's through increased use of.

It's through vehicles that increasingly won't let you get them into a position where they risk another's life and limb that will drive the technology. So what do I see the future as? It's quite a common. There were lots of points in there. I think quite rightly, we'll see vehicles get safety.

Quite rightly we'll see more cases where the vehicle takes control when it needs to. It's not that far away now when vehicles will be able to run automatically on a motorway, for example. Beyond that, I think you.

We really are probably beyond, certainly my working life, maybe my actual life, to be able to see a fully autonomous vehicle, and I think this is one of the key questions, is that not wanting perfection to be the enemy of good, we shouldn't, we shouldn't not automate vehicles until they're able to handle every possible scenario. We should see that drifting towards autonomy. But the vehicle that you can drive down the M1 autonomously probably isn't too far away.

The vehicle you can drive through the middle of York on a rainy Wednesday evening in Russia, which is probably a long, long way away, because the amount of input it would need, the amount of control it would need, the amount of computing power just isn't there. It's just not there at the moment.

So I think the future for me, and I think maybe as I start to think about handing my driving license back in 20 or 30 years, I think the last vehicle I will own will be a semi autonomous one that can automate in lots of ways, that can self park, maybe can even drive itself, maybe can even go and get itself out the garage and park it self in the street. Can drive myself down the motorway, happily, but will still need me to drive it under Complex situations.

Dave Atkinson

:: 37:00

I was, I was really hoping you would say my last car will be a 1982 Vauxhall Cavalier.

Darren Capes

:: 37:09

Well, yeah, so there's a side issue, isn't there?

I do think that traditionally traditional, fully analog vehicles, I think they will start to go up in value because I think there is a visceral enjoyment to doing that. That means that.

And I do wonder in the future whether, you know, lots of us, people like me, who like cars and new self Dave, whether we always will, whether we will have some very high tech, semi autonomous vehicle, plus a cheeky little master MX5 in the garage. And I think we need to again go back to the early point about understanding the bigger picture.

It isn't enough to just think of the engineering future that will get us to autonomous vehicles because fundamentally the public have got to want to do this and politicians have got to feel safe and politically safe in legislating this. And if that doesn't happen, it won't happen.

And I think it's going to be a long while before people are ready to allow politicians to sign away their right to jump in the car and drive off down the road as they wish. And I think that's a long way away. And I think just another point as well, and I've been involved in research over the years that's shown this.

People don't like vehicles that drive themselves.

The idea of jumping in, the idea of this mobility as a service future where you use an app and a little pod turns up outside your office and you jump in and it takes you home, people don't like that. We are a long way from acceptance of that.

Yeah, it's the thing, yeah, it's the thing that the aircraft manufacturers tell you that you don't need a pilot in the front of a plane. The plane would quite happily autonomously fly you from, from London to New York. But people wouldn't get on a plane without a pilot in them.

Dave Atkinson

:: 38:53

Without a pilot.

Darren Capes

:: 38:54

Yeah, no, we've got to be, we've got to be cognizant of that fact. I think.

Dave Atkinson

:: 38:59

Absolutely right. We've, we've become, for the right reasons.

I think we focus quite a bit on traffic in cars, wanting to dig in, conscious of time, but wanting to dig in a little bit about.

Because obviously there's a backdrop here of carbon reduction, emissions, things like that, which is technology is largely, it's largely taken care of and, and technology logic like. Sorry, Dan, my lads just walked in.

Yeah. Do you know what? I slightly lost track of time, so I'll just. I'll try and get back on subject.

Darren Capes

:: 39:52

So, other road users.

Dave Atkinson

:: 39:55

Yeah, other roadies. I think there's. Yes.

So if you just talk a little bit about other road users, because obviously we've got national international carbon reduction targets. We're both big advocates of sustainability. I think, I think it's written through, when you work at York about sustainable transport, etc.

Can you just give us a picture of your views on some of the technology in other areas? We talked about some of the technology in the area I work in now at the moment, Staffordshire around jcb, for example.

Could you just give us a few examples of what you see in what you're seeing down the road?

Darren Capes

:: 40:36

I think. Yeah. I think working in York again was as.

In so many ways, it was a great sort of way of getting into this because York was one of the first cities in the UK to adopt a hierarchy of road users, which basically said in all the planning and all the decisions you make around the highway, you think about road users in a hierarchy that has pedestrians and cycles at the top and then public transport and actually car bond commuting right at the bottom. That's how we should think about the network. And that's now a widely adopted principle.

You know, even the Department of Transport talks about a hierarchy of road users and we shouldn't forget that. And actually we should be promoting that. And you. You're right, that, that. That's got ever more important.

And certainly with the recent change of government, we have a new.

We have a Labor government that's come in and absolutely wants to focus on public transport, on buses and rail, wants to focus on active travel, cycling and walking. Doesn't necessarily see dealing with. It doesn't necessarily see making car use easier and simpler as being the sort of thing it wants to do.

And I think that's a very reasonable position. I think it's a position that lots of people would agree with. Technology has to be part of that.

And I think one of the dangers, and we've already seen this with E bikes and E scooters, is cities that have done a lot of work around promoting cycling and walking and started to get really good figures around cycling and walking levels in cities.

I started to see that diminish because people started to move to E bikes and E scooters and you think, well, at least they're not in cars, but E bikes and E scooters are not as efficient as cycling and walking. They still have an energy impact. They still require resources to build the things and then run the things.

They don't offer the health benefits that cycling and walking does. So you could say that there's a kind of unintended consequence there.

And actually, as we move to self driving fully electricity vehicles, that could get a lot worse.

You could, you could really end up seeing a thing where people are driven away from, excuse the pun, people are driven away from cycling and walking into using vehicles. Because the sort of immediate environmental impacts that we see now around petrol and diesel and like aren't there anymore.

We've got to guard against them. Got to make cycling, walking more appealing. We've got to make it.

We've got to start to think, as engineers have got to start to think about the whole journey from, from the front door to the office door or wherever you're going. And we've got to start to think about, about that. And for me, that's where data and data fusion really comes into this.

Because if you're, you know, we've talked a lot about vehicles and you know, what's underpinning v2i and veto x is the trance is a flowing of data, data moving from different places, data that tells you what's going on. That data has got to be part of a bigger understanding of data that allows us to give people choices about the whole of their journey.

And I think that that's key is that we start to. We get to a point where people use the right mode for the right journey.

So they walk when they walk, they cycle when they cycle, they use the car when they need to use the car.

And in an age where people increasingly look at their mobile phone as the thing that will tell them how to do whatever it is they want to do, transport has to be part of that. And again, that's where the public sector comes in, because we are the ones that should be able to corral that together. We're the ones.

The public sector is the one that cares about all modes, not just the mode that a company happens to make money out of or whatever. So the work that London have done with things like Citymapper, the work they've done in building services that cover all modes, is the future.

But using the technology that we put into vehicles, not just to make vehicles harder to crash into each other, but also to make them harder to crash into pedestrians and cyclists, is important because we know that one of the Great barriers to pedestrians to walk in the cycling is fear of increasingly busy roads. So we don't.

What we don't want as we move to V2V and autonomous vehicles is vehicles that move faster and more closely together, for example, because that just makes the roads more intimidating. There is a real need to see all this through that lens of cycling and walking.

As people say, the most efficient journey you could ever make is the one that you don't make. So with homework, that's an option.

Dave Atkinson

:: 44:39

Yeah.

Darren Capes

:: 44:40

Following that, the next most efficient Jenny you can make is one that's human powered.

And we need to ensure that the technology we put in place both makes that safe and comfortable, but also makes it clear that it's an option where it is an option and the data and the modeling that we do at a city level promotes that.

Dave Atkinson

:: 45:00

And you're a very committed cyclist, aren't you, Darren? Like long distance, you know.

Darren Capes

:: 45:07

Absolutely, yeah.

Dave Atkinson

:: 45:08

Beyond, you know, the likes of me doing like a paper round style wander around the local town.

You put a lot of Mars in on a bike, so you, you put personal experience of, of the value from a health perspective, from, you know, a journey sustainability perspective. You're big cycle advocate too.

Darren Capes

:: 45:33

And that tells me a few things. You know, it tells me that actually it doesn't rain as often as we think it does.

You don't get wet on a bike as often as you maybe think you're going to, but it tells me that roads are dangerous and I wouldn't ride down a busy air road on a bike, certainly not at night, but not even in the day. It's just too, it's not safe to do that.

So, yeah, you know, I see that and I look at, you know, I see that even now, you know, the way we maintain our roads is still very fatal focused and if roads have got potholes and cracks and things, they're generally at the edge of the road where the vehicles aren't, but the cyclists are, you know, and so, yeah, I see there are lots we can do, you know, there are lots we can do to improve technology. You know, I'm starting to use things like GPS devices on the bike that have a kind of emergency reporting function. That's the future.

You know, the next step for me is one is a device on my bike that broadcasts, acts like a beacon and broadcasts my presence into vehicles around me. So vehicles around me. Now I'm there.

I think that same technology path that we're seeing for vehicles will potentially be there for other modes as well. But it's important that we maintain that focus on those modes.

Dave Atkinson

:: 46:40

Excellent. Darren, as always, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for being my first guest on the podcast.

Take care and I'll speak to you again soon, hopefully on the podcast.

Darren Capes

:: 46:57

Fantastic. Thank you for having me. It's been a great, great to be able to talk about some of this stuff, so thank you very much. David.