CLUSTER 6: SOCIETAL ASPECTS AND PEOPLE NEEDS

Introduction

It is widely understood that the successful deployment of CCAM depends largely on the societal benefits it can generate and on adoption by users. “Users” is to be understood in a wide sense: it includes individual users of CCAM services and of the wider transport system but also communities, commercial actors and other organisations that are involved in the mobility of persons and goods. To achieve the desired benefits, CCAM development, deployment and regulation have to be based on a well-founded and genuine understanding of the societal context, specific needs, impacts (positive as well as negative) and costs. Taking into account the full range of users, as well as societal aspects, is a prerequisite for offering CCAM services that are relevant, appreciated, acceptable, and most appropriate for serving social, economic, and environmental needs and objectives. Not to be forgotten are road-users that potentially could be affected by the CCAM-mobility services, but not currently taking a direct role in them.

Cluster 6 Objectives

• Provide input on societal and people needs for the right setup of Large-scale Demonstrations, requirements on studies; what needs to be tested to verify adoption; and to confirm societal expectations in Living Labs (to Cluster 1).
• Deliver people and societal needs for input to accessible solution development (to Cluster 2) and validation (to Cluster 3).
• Provide the user perspective and societal needs to develop and guide overall transport system integration and effects on sustainable land-use (to Cluster 4).
• Provide societal needs and concerns to be addressed while developing and adapting Key Enabling Technologies for CCAM (Cluster 5).
• Give feedback on societal aspects in co-creating Living Labs for evaluation methodologies (to Cluster 7).

Actions in Cluster 6 will investigate, in the widest sense, the needs of the European society at large, of citizens, organisations and CCAM users, and how CCAM can play a role in meeting those needs. Methods and measures will be developed for capturing these demands as well as the expectations, desires and concerns towards CCAM, considering that they may change over time. The evolving societal context will be assessed in order to understand how CCAM and associated services can positively contribute to societal targets for decarbonisation and environment, such as the Green Deal, as well as for equity, safety, accessibility, land use and urban structures. The benefits of CCAM for different types of users in a variety of settings -within but also outside urban areas – including the conditions for achieving them as well as direct and indirect costs in the short, medium and long term – need to be understood, handled and transferred into the CCAM development process. Methods will be developed to adequately assess the socio-economic impacts and to address interdependencies of effects in different timeframes. CCAM developers, deployers and public authorities will be provided with tools to implement people-centred solutions that effectively contribute to the societal targets and the adoption of CCAM systems and services at regional level. Furthermore, the workforce consequences of higher degrees of automation and digitalisation in CCAM road transport will be analysed, taking a holistic view on mobility and which professions may be affected. The requirements for new or adapted skills and educational programmes will be defined. In addition, the need for enhancing organisational capacity within local government will be explored, in terms of transport management, planning and policy making, to ensure the public sector has up to date knowledge for dialogue with CCAM service and solution providers.

The uptake of CCAM relies on attractive, meaningful offers that address people and societal needs. These needs have to be understood in CCAM offers, using broad and highly integrated methodologies, which can be empirical. They have to go beyond technical aspects, and enable society to reach targets on decarbonisation and climate change. Vision Zero – i.e. no road traffic deaths, and ambitions to increase equity, and to reach prosperity and profitability, are other examples of societal needs that CCAM deployment should be designed to support. There is a growing understanding that CCAM services should not limit themselves to the vehicle and infrastructure that allows the transport of persons or goods from point A to point B within as well as outside metropolitan settings, but should also ensure that the full purpose of the trip can be achieved.

While demonstrations involving members of the public or stakeholder engagement have been ongoing for some time; user and societal aspects for higher degrees of automation are being explored (e.g. SHOW, Hi-DRIVE, MODI, AWARD, ULTIMO, KIRA) and are being further developed by two Horizon Europe projects started in 2022. Namely SINFONICA will develop strategies, methods and tools to engage CCAM users, citizens, service providers and other stakeholders to collect, understand and structure their needs, desires, and concerns related to CCAM in a manageable and exploitable way, whereas MOVE2CCAM, will engage with citizens across its three prototypical regions to co-create CCAM use cases that respond to their mobility needs.

Co-creation with potential end-users or non-users of CCAM services as well as with deployers – primarily cities/municipalities, regions and passenger transport authorities/operators – is highlighted as critical for successful CCAM implementation. Large-scale participatory processes targeting future users, citizens, and specific groups need to be established to identify their needs and to involve them in subsequent design and development processes.

Compared to vehicle and technically-oriented efforts, aspects related to inclusiveness and equity are farless common in CCAM design or R&I, and rarely go beyond considering persons with reduced mobility, gender, and age groups, or vulnerable road users (for a gender example, see the Horizon 2020-projects DIAMOND and VI-DAS; for an example on vulnerable road users, see the Horizon Europe project AWARE2ALL). Persons with different income levels or different digital experiences are additional examples of user groups that need to be included to reach a more all-encompassing analysis of needs and expectations, whether at a micro or macro level.

Deployment of CCAM will generate impacts, positive as well as negative, which have to be known and handled. Balancing these effects can be seen as one societal need. The prospect of generating profitable business is one of the drivers for CCAM. However earlier promises made, e.g., by robo-taxi companies, about operating large fleets of vehicles without drivers by the early 2020s have fallen well short. Research indeed reveals that shared mobility is emerging slowly due to economic, instrumental, affective, symbolic, tax-revenue, governance and administrative reasons. A consequence is that investors interested in more short-term gains are reported to be considering switching interest towards less-complex, less cash-intensive forms of autonomy with a clearer path to payback, operating at lower speeds with little to no traffic.

Moreover, policy makers and planning professionals are exhibiting a reactionary rather than pro-active attitude towards CCAM deployment. While the societal impact of CCAM is the subject of research, there are few practices and research for translating such knowledge into concrete planning, policy and governance guidelines opening up the way for real-life implementations. Mobility as a Service (MaaS), including business models, needs to be included and must move beyond available validated methodologies for impact measurement of existing technologies. Efforts to elevate methodologies from surveying or interviewing into more extensive interactions in the form of citizens’ dialogues and workshops (collaboration with Cluster 7), and integration of developments in living labs (collaboration with Cluster 1) need to make sure that the implementation side (municipalities, cities, regions) and service providers are involved.

Move2CCAM will establish a multi-systems network of actors across the whole CCAM ecosystem consisting of industries, authorities, researchers, and citizens that will be engaged through a series of co-creation activities, dialogues, social simulation experiments, virtual reality games, and AV demonstrations in eight European countries and at a pan-European level to collect data and specify the multisystem impacts of CCAMs. The project will furthermore co-develop through a series of workshops prototype business models with a wide range of organisations from the public and private sectors. These business models will be integrated with the economic assessment criteria of the Move2CCAM impact assessment tool.

Trust, privacy, and ethics are considered important factors to foster user acceptance of CCAM. CCAM within MaaS usually means involving some kind of shared or pooled on-demand passenger or goods transport – a theme that is addressed in several projects. To make such operations financially viable, it is necessary to remove the steward who typically is on board in current European pilots of self-driving vehicles. Ruter, the public transport agency in the Oslo region, has stated its ambition to implement steward-less autonomous vehicles. When such services involve “sharing”, this in turn creates new aspects of acceptance. Moreover, it is a question of aligning policies and plans for deployment of CCAM in cities with public transportation or MaaS, which is not yet the case.

The European Commission is making efforts to establish tools for assessing societal readiness and stakeholder involvement to prepare for the effective and responsible integration of R&I projects into society. Ethical issues have been discussed in a report by a Commission Expert Group^[5] and will be considered for the implementation of the CCAM R&I agenda. High expectations on job growth (e.g., in the field of ITS) through CCAM are contrasted by fears of job losses through automation (for example for bus drivers). The Covid pandemic has aggravated the alleged shortage of commercial vehicle drivers. As such, projects should develop actionable analyses capturing a larger scope and systems level to support the realisation of job growth aspirations and to enhance innovation capabilities

^[5] European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Ethics of connected and automated vehicles: recommendations on road safety, privacy, fairness, explainability and responsibility, Publications Office, 2020, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/966923.

Cluster 6 R&I Actions

The specific R&I actions relating to “Societal aspects and people needs” are the following:

• Societal, citizen and user needs – for needs-based CCAM solution development and deployment. This action strives for a better understanding of needs, expectations and desires of future users, citizens, and society at large, inside and outside cities, taking into account decarbonisation, energy and resource conservation. The effects on CCAM of new societal trends, like the hybridisation of work, and new transport needs, habits and attitudes arising from the pandemic and associated policies, like lockdowns, should also be considered. This will be essential input into the design and development of viable CCAM services and solutions – as well as to policies – that can best serve these needs, without increasing equity gaps. “Avoid-shift-improve” transport should be considered.
• Socio-economic and environmental impact analysis and target-based assessment of CCAM benefits. This action will lead to comprehensive impact assessment methods that cover the full range of effects of the full value chain of mobility systems and services involving CCAM, taking into account under-researched fields and groups. The ambition is to provide tools for using desired impacts as a key input in CCAM development and deployment, and thereby reach expected effects. These tools should be iteratively designed with the active input of the actual users in order to be effective and reliable.
• Workforce development and knowledge enhancement. This action aims to define and assess opportunities to meet expectations on job growth through CCAM services’ wider deployment. Activities might include the impact assessment of higher degrees of automation and digitalisation in road transport on the future workforce, new trends in working conditions and an analysis of requirements for workforce skills along the full value and educational chains.

Cluster 6 Expected Outcomes

• Detailed, robust and documented knowledge on planning, policy and governance transitions required for real-life implementation of CCAM systems and services. This includes, in particular, guidance on the extent, bundling and timing of required policy (e.g., about information provision, infrastructures, operations, services) and governance changes (e.g., about regulations, taxation, administrative structures) at national, regional and local levels for societally beneficial CCAM real-life integration.
• Detailed, robust and documented knowledge (e.g. knowledge maps) of citizens’, users’ and implementers’ expectations, concerns and desires with regard to CCAM services and solutions for the mobility of persons and goods, with special attention to the needs of vulnerable users and under-researched groups. This knowledge is to be integrated into:
  • the design and development of CCAM solutions to support these specific needs.
  • educational and workforce development actions to enable delivery of services.
• A well-founded understanding of effects and impacts (positive as well as negative), benefits and costs of CCAM systems and services (short, medium, long-term), profitable business models, and how CCAM can support the Green Deal.
• KPIs incorporating societal targets with mobility needs for individuals, be it for their personal transport or for their goods. Methods and indicators to assess the impacts of CCAM solutions on mobility and wider socio-economic effects (public health, land use/infrastructure need, environmental aspects such as energy use, accessibility, air quality, carbon emissions and impact on economy, employment, working conditions and required skills, etc.).
• Recommendations for large-scale demonstration projects of CCAM involving MaaS, to include user and societal aspects taking into account location-specific characteristics of the implementation area – which can also be beyond an urban setting, such as local policy targets, population density, and cultural matters.
• Methods and tools for CCAM developers and providers, public authorities, municipalities and citizens: These should enable service design, decision making, and implementation of user-centred solutions and business cases that effectively contribute to decarbonisation and the Green Deal, and other societal targets, including equity and inclusiveness, as well as the uptake of CCAM systems at regional level.
• Knowledge and understanding of the policy environment fostering CCAM business and labour market dynamism with incentives for increased investment from companies in human capital, supporting mobility and on the job training.
• Framework for building CCAM related awareness, knowledge and competence at all levels of society – from school curricula, training of persons in the entire mobility service value-chain, users, planners, decision makers in public and private contexts. Definition of short and long-term demands for updated skills and enhanced knowledge for the range of professions related to mobility services involving CCAM.
• Input for the design and evaluation of CCAM partnership activities, in particular for the largescale demonstrators (ex-ante and ex-post), and for public engagement activities aimed at realistically informing users of CCAM capabilities and expectations.
• All the above expected outcomes should support the uptake and adoption of CCAM services and solutions, and CCAM’s contribution to meeting societal targets

Cluster 6 “Societal aspects and people needs” lays the foundation for understanding citizens’ and society’s needs and the expected impacts of CCAM, and interacts therefore with all other clusters. It provides input in terms of emphasising topics that need to be investigated in more detail to maximize the benefits to society. It also sets boundaries and informs the other clusters about potential unintended effects.

Cluster 6 Timeline (as of Feb 2024)

Based on R&I actions for Needs and Impact, Cluster 6 will deliver to all clusters up-to-date and relevant input for the upcoming phases of the Programme: future users’ needs to be taken into account, and socio-economic impacts for use in pro-active planning of clusters’ actions. Output from other clusters will create a wider view of needs and impacts through e.g. experiences from large scale demos and user centric solutions (Clusters 1,2) and Clusters 3, 4. Furthermore, new key enabling technologies (Cluster 5) and Cluster 7 activities will create new opportunities to understand and assess needs and impacts. The consecutive Cluster 6 RIAs on Needs and Impact will capture and handle both these inputs and the dynamic nature of CCAM, the continued deployment, updated set of stakeholders and their needs, societal evolution etc. Additionally, there is the accelerated technology development, which influences CCAM but also the methods and tools that can be used and developed. The late Impact RIAs will provide foundation for the CCAM SRIA update for the Partnership’s final societal impact assessment from Cluster 1 results (ex-post impact assessment). The Workforce R&I action starting in the third year of the partnership builds the base for addressing the consequences of CCAM deployment on the workforce and educational value chains. A second action in the third phase, following an implementation period, will advance the basis for realising expectations on job growth through CCAM.