In this IRF Executive Talk, Alice Yiu, IRF’s Head of Advocacy and Outreach, speaks with Mike Evans, Director at Arup and lead of its global roads and streets business, about how the sector is rethinking what it builds and how.

Evans explains why the old instinct to simply add road capacity no longer holds. The sector now has to win public trust and the answer lies in a shift of perspective, from counting vehicles to counting people, from building big to building right, and from repairing failures to preventing them.

Along the way, the conversation moves from Hong Kong’s transit networks to street lighting in Central Asia that extended traders’ working hours, to AI models that now spot road cracks faster than any human inspector. What emerges is a picture of an industry with the tools to deliver better service at lower cost, if its leaders are willing to think differently.

The themes of this conversation, trust, delivery and innovation, take centre stage at the IRF 2026 Annual Conference in Geneva, 16 to 18 November. Evans’ message to the community ahead of it: embrace the excitement.

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Interview Transcript:

Alice Yiu: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the IRF Executive Talk, where the road sector’s top minds think out loud about the challenges, ideas and leadership defining our industry. My name is Alice Yiu, I am the Head of Advocacy and Outreach at the International Road Federation, and I’m really delighted to be joined today by Mike Evans, Director at Arup. Mike, welcome.

Mike Evans: Very good to be here. Thank you very much.

Alice Yiu: Thank you very much, Mike, for joining us. For those who are watching, Arup is one of the world’s leading and largest global consultancies, with extensive technical and advisory expertise working across a number of sectors, including transport, energy, water, property, cities and more.

Mike, you lead Arup’s roads and streets business globally, as well as the transport business in Europe. You’re a civil engineer by training, with many years of experience working with transport authorities, governments, and contractors to shape and deliver road and transportation systems that drive connectivity, accessibility, and long-term resilience. So in a nutshell, you’re really the ideal person to have this conversation with. And I’m sure it’s a very timely one, because we’re seeing right now in the road sector a genuine shift, not just in what we’re building, but also in why we’re building it and who it is meant to serve. So I really look forward to having this conversation with you.

Let’s start with a bit of an existential question. Mike, you’ve spent your career working on roads. What is it about roads that keeps you so passionate about this work?

Mike Evans: I have been fascinated by roads and streets since I was a kid, so I am working in the thing that I always wanted to work in. I enjoy thinking about how people travel around. I come from the west of Ireland, so when I grew up, it was a remote place. I lived in a county on the west coast, very far away from everything. And I can remember that moment of being able to travel, whether it was to walk, to bike as you grow older and then eventually a car. It relates to freedom. It allows you to get to places you could not be.

So for me, it’s linked to the fact that people get to have autonomy and get to do the things they want to do. And I don’t think we think about that enough. What I do enables people to get to school, to get jobs, to get to hospitals, to do recreation, all of those things. So how you walk, how you cycle, how you use your car, and how we use public transport on our road networks in remote places like where I came from really matters. So I think it’s quite an interesting job.

And if I talk to the young people that are working in our teams now, when I started off, we were using cars that had been around for 100 years and road construction materials that had been around for 100 years. It’s so much more exciting now. There’s so much more technology, a huge amount of evolution in what we can do. You’ve got electric vehicles reducing emissions. You’ve got autonomous vehicles. Vehicles are connected to the network, so we can control and influence things much more. The way we think about public transport and cycling facilities, all of this is just so much better than it was when I started. So I think it’s also an exciting time to be in the industry.

Alice Yiu: I can hear the passion. I’m not an engineer by training, but I definitely share the passion for transport, and I love some of the keywords you’re mentioning. I think what makes roads so unique is that they’re really one of the most universal pieces of infrastructure in the world. Everyone uses them every day. There’s something very deeply embedded in our lives that we use sometimes without noticing it.

But what we have discussed before with some of our community members is that the sector sometimes struggles to connect with the public, even while being used on a daily basis. Sometimes there’s public opposition to road projects, there are community pushbacks, or sometimes people are simply indifferent to what is happening with the roads around them. People perceive roads as noisy, as polluting, as something that divides their neighbourhoods or disrupts nature, and not necessarily something that is done for them. Is that something you see in your work as well? And why has the question of public trust become so important for the road sector today?

Mike Evans: I think there are two parts to answering that question. When you live on a street, or you live on a lane in the countryside and you use it, you understand the benefit that you’re getting from it. It relates to your immediate life. But when we build big roads — and I sometimes walk along the edges of our very big motorways, wearing a high-vis jacket and all of that protection — they’re not pretty places. They’re scary places. They’re dangerous places. And immediately, if you’re going to have one of these in your neighbourhood or beside where you live, they’re not a welcome intrusion.

So it’s very important that we explain to people why they’re required. But then there’s another part of it. An awful lot of the time, for the people who use our road networks, their experience of our road networks is not optimal either. They’re not safe, they’re congested, they don’t enable the journeys that people actually want to make. And people don’t have the choices they’d like to have to make their journeys. Sometimes there are people on our road networks in cars on their own who don’t want to be in a car on their own, spending too much time.

They’d much rather be on a bus or a train, which are much more convenient, able to read a newspaper or look at their emails, whatever it is. So there’s a balance about creating a service, and thinking about the people who use our networks as users and customers, and about their experience. If they’re not getting what they want — the intrusion is not optimal and the experience is not optimal — trust is eroded, I suppose, is the way of putting it.

Alice Yiu: I like the word optimal, and I really think this is a word that defines our society these days. In everything we do, we want to ask: are we using our time most effectively? Are we using the asset most effectively? Are we using our money and resources in the most optimal way? So the idea of optimising our infrastructure has so much to do with public trust and legitimacy, and how we spend the money for these road projects.

And that’s a really interesting point, because you also mentioned the cars and materials we were running back in those days, and how quickly the sector has evolved. For many decades, success in transport was essentially measured in very limited ways: how many vehicles can we move in a certain period of time, how fast they’re moving, how far they can go from one end to another. I read some time ago that global car ownership was around 50 million cars on the road in the 1950s, and now it’s around 1.4 billion. That’s massive growth over just decades. For the longest time, building more road capacity was the obvious answer to accommodate this phenomenon. How do you think this mindset is evolving today?

Mike Evans: If I go back to when I was a much younger person interested in roads, it was always about building more roads. As a kid, I’d sketch out the roads and they’d be getting bigger and bigger, and they’d be full of more cars. We live in a different age. We understand planetary boundaries. We understand the need for the circular economy. We understand the need to reduce the amount of materials that we use. But more than that — you used the word trust earlier on — we must be trusted by government to provide infrastructure that is efficient. And part of that efficiency is being affordable, so that we use the least amount of not just resources, but money, to build what we need. So that’s what’s quite exciting, coming back to that word optimal. If we can optimise what we build, use the least amount of space and provide the amount of capacity that is required — but not too much capacity — we build what’s needed today and think about how we would provide more efficiently in the future.

Another thing that’s quite exciting: you spoke about counting the vehicles that can travel on your road and how fast they can travel. Switching to counting passengers, the number of people that are travelling — once you make that quick change in your thinking, you begin to ask: can I have shared lanes? Can I have more buses on the network? Then there are the things we can do with information technology to help manage the flow on our network.

I was watching a talk on your channel lately where you were discussing that. So it is quite exciting. I often think there’s a convergence with the railway network, which was quite a systemised, controlled network. You can see the two modes converging in terms of our use of technology to control the movement of vehicles. But then, thinking beyond that, I’m often struck when I’m reviewing something like a major road around a city or a town bypass. The first thing is trying to understand where people are moving and what people are doing. Most of the trips are actually going to be very close to the place you’re looking at. And it’s about creating the opportunity for journeys that are shorter — maybe they don’t need to be on your road network at all. Maybe if you provide cycling infrastructure, you can reduce the amount of demand on your major road network, as well as giving people more attractive choices.

Alice Yiu: I love it. You mentioned you grew up in Ireland — I actually grew up in Hong Kong, one of the densest cities in the world: 7.5 million people, all packed into a territory of just over 1,000 square kilometres. It’s really a very massive city with a lot of people that have very big transport needs. So the throughput of passengers is the key in a city where we really need to optimise every single inch of the territory that we have. And journeys are often very short. We need to make sure that roads are the bloodline of our transport systems, but we won’t be able to move if everybody has to drive on roads. We definitely need proper transit systems: we need the railways, we need the buses, we need the cycling. It’s interesting that you raised that point, because in the case of Hong Kong, it’s very hilly. I never learned how to cycle growing up — quite shamefully, since I work in this industry, though I do know how to bike now. But growing up I couldn’t, because we don’t have dedicated cycling lanes and it’s actually really dangerous to cycle downtown. So I just took the buses, and that’s how I learned to navigate my journeys. So the landscape — how the place is geographically set up — really matters, and the transport culture of that community, also really matters in terms of how you design the roads and the transit systems around it.

We keep coming back to the words optimal and efficient, and I want to throw in the word effective as well. If we check the dictionaries they may be a little different, but they’re all talking about the same thing: at some point, we want to achieve the intended results of our projects and our programmes. Arup does so many projects around the world. So what do effective roads mean to Arup in practice?

Mike Evans: I didn’t realise you were from Hong Kong, but Hong Kong is a really interesting test place if you think about some of the things we’ve just been talking about. Hong Kong has obviously got a fantastic metro system, with one of the highest rates of public transport use in the world. But when you think about road and street networks in Hong Kong, they’re still quite important, because there are trips that can’t take place on your fantastic metro system, and we need to provide for those trips to happen on the road and street network. So you need an infrastructure that works. As you mentioned, Hong Kong is constrained in its geography. It’s been expanding: reclamation is really important, and when you reclaim, you build really good public transport out to the new residential areas, but you need road infrastructure that goes out to serve that as well.

And as we build that, we need to think about being really efficient in how we’re doing it. An example: if you have a major bridge, rather than widen the bridge, can you use the hard shoulder as a lane, using traffic control to manage it so that lane can be used safely? How you toll is another way you can make the network more efficient. We’ve worked on removing hard tolling and replacing it with electronic tolling, which allows traffic to move more freely. It also frees up the land that the tolling infrastructure was taking, to be available for other things. So all of these things come together.

Another really interesting thing about Hong Kong is the bus system. How can you make sure your bus system is working really well? We’ve been working currently in the UK with the Department for Transport on how you make bus-optimised system. And coming back to Hong Kong, we think about autonomous vehicles. It’s really important that autonomous vehicles, when we deploy them, are used to move people not as individuals, but as a shared form of mobility. So in that hierarchy of modes, you have heavy rail to move large numbers of people, you have metros to move them in densely populated areas, but even in a city like Hong Kong, you can use a shared autonomous taxi to move four people, which is the right number of people to move. So that really comes back to optimised, and that word efficient: each trip is served by the right mode.

Alice Yiu: I like that definition a lot. There’s no silver bullet per se in terms of sustainable transport options. All of our trips have an intended outcome, and sometimes you need different modes to get you to that outcome. Sometimes we talk about Push and Pull, sometimes we talk about the Avoid–Shift–Improve Framework, which essentially says we can’t just go with one type of solution. We need different types of policies, innovations, and interventions: those that help avoid unnecessary motorised trips, those that shift to more sustainable transport modes like public transport, cycling, and walking, and those that improve the energy efficiency of the vehicles, the design, the energy sources, and the operations of the road systems. So it’s really a spectrum of interventions that we have to consider.

We’ve been talking about the developed part of the world. In Dublin, you have well-developed road networks, probably very nice quality and standards?

Mike Evans: Not as much as you’d think. We have a big road with a lot of congestion in Dublin, which people talk about a lot, and we need to build public transport to help solve the problem.

Alice Yiu: How’s it coming along?

Mike Evans: In Dublin, we hope to be working on a major metro scheme to connect the airport to the city centre, and that’s one way of getting people off the orbital road, the M50. But the M50 is quite an interesting road as well, because it’s a very carefully managed road — it has to be, to allow that number of people to flow around it. But you were trying to move the conversation on to places in the developing world, and I think that’s really interesting. In the work that we do, for example, we were working in Egypt, thinking about how we build infrastructure that will be climate resilient. That’s really important to think about. This week we’ve had the really hot weather in Europe, but in other places that I travel to, the effect of climate is much more dramatic in terms of hurricanes and intense weather. So we need to build climate-resilient infrastructure.

It’s also really interesting. If you take my learnings, there’s always the opportunity in those places to leapfrog past places like Dublin and avoid the mistakes that were made in the planning of Dublin, a very spread-out city: build infrastructure that allows more compact cities and better planning. But also in terms of rural infrastructure: how do we build road networks that are dispersed, and not jump to a large motorway solution when a more appropriately sized piece of infrastructure would be the right answer?

Alice Yiu: I’d like to follow up on that, because it’s a really interesting subject. When you look at the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, how they define rural access is essentially proximity: the share of the population living close to all-season roads. So it speaks to resilience — whether a road is operational across all seasons and times of the year — but it only speaks about proximity. It doesn’t really talk about how long it takes for you to get to that road, and it doesn’t say much about the conditions of the pavement on the way to that bigger road that connects you to other parts of the city. So in terms of rural networks — you talked about smaller infrastructure — what would those things be, and how do they make up that first- and last-mile connectivity that can serve developing regions?

Mike Evans: Last and first mile is very different in a rural context than it is in an urban context. And the point you’re making is that major national road networks rely on the secondary and tertiary roads to bring people to them, to allow the journeys that need to be made. So you do need to think of roads as a system.

Another point you mentioned there is the maintenance of a network. It’s really important that when we’re building, we think about the life cycle of what we’re building and make correct life-cycle assessments. That’s always important in terms of finance, so that the infrastructure we build is affordable to maintain and operate after it’s built; it’s not just about coming in and building something big.

But it’s also now much more important in terms of carbon. Earlier on, the topic of circular economy came up between us. Some of the work that we’ve done in the roads industry around taking a much more sustainable view of materials. There have been huge improvements in terms of asphalt: the amount of recycled asphalt content that we can use, and we’ve massively reduced the temperatures at which we lay asphalt. So I’m really proud of the fact that if you take road construction materials, I think we’re much closer to net-zero construction materials than other parts of the construction industry.

And whether you’re in the developed world or the developing world, I’m often struck that we don’t take into account that once you build a major road, it becomes a fast road and you encourage journeys — you induce trips that were not there. You need to think about providing infrastructure that is close to people, which reduces their need to take the trip in the first place. That is another way of thinking about how the system works: how the education system, for example, interacts with the transport system, and how we get that system to work efficiently. Back to that word efficiently again.

Alice Yiu: Yes, and I really like your point, because we as human beings interact with the infrastructure that we’re placed in. A lot of times people see roads as static, because they are concrete, they’re built there and they don’t move. But we react to them and that changes the patterns of our behaviour, whether it’s driving or using public transport or other modes. So it’s a very dynamic system. Roads are very dynamic, even though they’re static. That’s the irony of it. If we don’t have this in our scenarios, in our planning, with the foresight to know what’s going to come when we build a road, we’re not going to be able to accommodate the changes in the local community that responds to that road.

I also like your points about circularity, the materials being used, and maintenance. I feel these are also an opportunity for strengthening local communities in terms of social and economic opportunities. Do you have any examples of how this affects local communities in terms of socio-economic opportunities and growth?

Mike Evans: An interesting question for an engineer. At the end of the day, what we’re building is for our society. I was reading a report last week about work that we were doing in Central Asia. The project focuses on the impacts of lighting provisions to the local community that uses the road. Lighting is something you need to carefully manage: if you provide too much of it, you use too much energy. But when you provide lighting, you make the space safer, and you allow more inclusive trips. What was really interesting about this report was that it also allowed street traders’ hours to be extended, because the hours during which it was safe to work were longer.

Another important point is about planning. How we do things has improved drastically. When I started off working, we used traffic models that thought about cars, and how fast and efficient we want them to be. Now we model people, and we think about the agency that they have. We use agent-based modelling to consider the actual journeys that people are making.

I think that’s a way of thinking that improves the outcome for people, as distinct from thinking about what you’re doing just as a conduit for moving vehicles. And when you begin to design in response to that, you get much better outcomes, you get more efficient infrastructure, and you get to save some money, because you don’t have to build as much of it.

Alice Yiu: Do you think we’re better at measuring these outcomes than five years ago?

Mike Evans: I do. One of the things I’m astounded by, and intrigued by, is how AI is beginning to change what we can analyse. I think that is going to be really exciting in the next two to three years. It improves how we think about things.

Coming back to how you analyse asphalt: our ability to see the defects on the road network. We used to examine the videos that came in and identify the cracks ourselves. Now, having trained the AI model to find the cracks for us, we can process an awful lot more information. And that begins to change things. You bring that together with connected vehicles and harness that technology. That’s extraordinarily exciting as well.

Alice Yiu: Last month I was actually attending the World Transport Convention in Tianjin, China. Of all places in the world, China is a very leading figure in terms of AI application in the road sector. It was a full day of symposiums, one technical presentation after another about AI, automation, data, self-driving, you name it. There’s so much on offer in the innovation space. It was like going to a carnival for a transport-passionate person, just sitting there and listening to all the new things happening. But you mentioned something that was also a recurring theme I heard from the experts there: this idea of a transport system being preventive versus being responsive. Can you walk us through the difference between preventive and responsive, and how technology is making a difference?

Mike Evans: In the world that I work in, we have very big pieces of infrastructure. Bridges, for example: we tend to take an approach to a bridge that we build it to last for a very long time; our design life for a bridge will be 80 to 120 years. It’s really interesting to contrast that with the other asset that we have, which is asphalt. Asphalt has a shorter life, so we’ve always thought about asphalt in terms of managing its deterioration and being able to predict its maintenance. And the really important thing with road surfaces is that you do preventative maintenance, which extends their lifespan and makes the deterioration curve much shallower.

I think it’s going to be really interesting whether we can take that approach and apply it to those other, longer-lived assets. And what becomes really interesting is that as we refurbish things, we can apply technology and manage the asset in real time. This is where it gets really connected: the prospect of being able to measure the load on our infrastructure and respond to it.

Being responsive is where you see the problem arise and then repair it at that point. It is much more expensive than taking a preventative approach. This comes back to a proper life-cycle approach to our assets: well-managed assets. And to bring it back to the start, you used the word “trust”. If we can demonstrate that we’re providing value for money in maintaining and operating efficient networks, and explain that this is a much cheaper approach to our infrastructure than building it, letting it deteriorate, and then replacing it, which is much more expensive.

Of course, maintaining is the most circular approach you can take in the first place: keep it in use, reuse. These things are all part of the system we’re trying to provide. And it is quite interesting and exciting, as I said earlier, that these techniques are becoming available to us.

Alice Yiu: You’re very right, and it’s not just value for money. A lot of the time it’s value for taxpayers’ money, isn’t it? So it’s absolutely important to prove that point: there’s an economic case for good maintenance and life-cycle approaches. The traditional approach is essentially a system that reacts to failure. You wait for a failure to be reported and then go and fix it.

There’s a newer and better way we can approach things, whether it’s road safety, maintenance, climate resilience, or resolving congestion and traffic management. All of it can take on that mindset, in order to save money, save time, and actually improve the operations of the agencies and authorities that take care of those assets.

Essentially, that’s what we’re trying to do at the International Road Federation: influence the sector with that mindset with better practice, better policies, better innovation. Colleagues like you are very helpful in sharing insights and foresight with our community, to see what new changes we can take on today and how we can apply them to practice.

So, looking ahead: what do you think will define successful road agencies and infrastructure leaders over the next decade?

Mike Evans: Well, let’s talk a little bit about what they’re going to encounter. In well-developed road networks, the networks are old, they’re aging, and they’re going to need to be refurbished and replaced. The climate is going to provide us with a lot more challenges, so we’re going to have to think about resilient infrastructure. And in the face of all of this, societal change, changes to our economic growth, governments are challenged by funding. Join up all of those things, and that’s what we’re going to have to face.

What success is going to look like is how we deal with all of that. I think there’s huge opportunity in the new infrastructure that we build to bring new technology onto the system. And in the networks that we already have, as we refurbish them and make them future-fit, we can make them much better.

It’s really interesting to me that in places like Germany and the UK, we get to fix some of the mistakes that we made the first time around with some of this infrastructure. Thinking about nature on our infrastructure, for example, and using nature-positive solutions to deal with some of the changing weather that we’re facing, can actually be a more efficient way to do things.

When we look at the network in the future, success will look like this: we’ve taken the connected power of vehicles, as well as the autonomous vehicles that are coming onto our network, to manage flows on our network, and we’re using connected vehicles to help us manage the infrastructure. We were just speaking about preventative maintenance, so using connected vehicles as a live feed on the condition of our road network. And if you take the power that AI brings and bring that all together, what success looks like is a much better service at a lower cost.

Alice Yiu: It really requires agencies and leaders to think out of the box, doesn’t it? You need to think in a very holistic way and systematically address all these issues together, but not without solutions.

As you’ve mentioned, there are already examples being applied, and there are companies like Arup that are ready to provide that service to solve these problems.

We’re coming to the end of our conversation, sadly. If you’re aware of IRF, you probably know that we’re hosting our upcoming 2026 Annual Conference in Geneva, from the 16th to the 18th of November, under the theme we just talked about: trust, delivery, innovation, topics I have really enjoyed talking with you today.

And thanks to Arup, who has so generously sponsored and supported our flagship event of the year. We are really looking forward to continuing these conversations with our community.

So Mike, as final words: if you could leave one message for the global road community ahead of the IRF 2026 Annual Conference, what would it be?

Mike Evans: Embrace the excitement. This is an exciting industry that we work in, and I’m really interested in getting younger people involved in what is a fantastic industry.

Alice Yiu: That’s great and I hope I’m one of the younger people you can get into it. Thank you very much, Mike, for this wonderful conversation. I learned a lot, and I’m sure our viewers have as well.

I look forward to continuing these ideas and to meeting you in person in Geneva in just a couple of months. With that, I will close the conversation for now, and we’ll continue it in Geneva. Thank you very much.

Mike Evans: Thank you. Bye-bye.