CCAM ERAS: Building the Socio-Economic Foundations for Automated Mobility

In the coming decade, connected, cooperative and automated mobility (CCAM) will move decisively from experimentation to deployment enabled by regulatory shifts. While technological progress has been substantial, the transition raises a wider set of social and economic questions related to people, jobs, skills and stakeholders. These challenges are no longer secondary considerations. They are central to how CCAM will be accepted, scaled and sustained.

The CCAM ERAS project was developed to address these questions arising from the transition from a socio-economic perspective. Rather than focusing exclusively on vehicles or infrastructure, it examines how labour markets evolve, how skills systems must adapt and how public authorities can manage change responsibly. At its core, the project seeks to ensure that CCAM contributes to a more inclusive and resilient mobility ecosystem, where innovation and societal outcomes are aligned.

Running under Horizon Europe, the project brings together expertise from transport, technology, education and policy. Its ambition is to transform uncertainty into structured knowledge and to translate this knowledge into practical tools that stakeholders can apply.

A Stakeholder Co-Creation Tool for Shaping the Transition

A defining feature of CCAM ERAS is its structured approach to stakeholder engagement. The project recognises that socio-economic transformations cannot be understood or governed in isolation. Instead, they require continuous interaction between those who design, regulate, operate and are affected by emerging mobility systems.

To address this, the project established a stakeholder community that includes industry representatives, public authorities, researchers, education providers and labour organisations. Through an iterative process of workshops, focus groups, interviews and surveys, this community played an active role in shaping the project’s data collection, analysis and outputs.

This ensured that assumptions regarding employment impacts and wider societal effects were tested against lived experience. One of the most important insights emerging from this process is the need for stronger alignment across sectors. Transport, technology and education attributes are deeply interconnected in the context of CCAM, but they often operate in silos. The stakeholder process demonstrates how bridging these silos can improve both the relevance and the legitimacy of proposed solutions.

An Innovation Radar for Mapping the CCAM Landscape

A critical starting point for understanding the socio-economic implications of CCAM is a structured view of the innovation landscape itself. CCAM‑ERAS addresses this through an innovation radar that examines not only technological developments, but also the broader system in which they operate.

This approach is based on a PESTLE framework covering political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental dimensions. By combining these perspectives, the project highlights how factors such as regulation, investment conditions, public acceptance and sustainability goals directly influence the pace and direction of CCAM deployment.

The work then progressed to define six use case that enabled the project to refine its focus across both applications and timeframes. The resulting use cases were:

Use cases

These use cases have been mapped to state-of-the-art knowledge and technologies through a systematic process of analysis that explores technology, deployment, regulatory, business case and user group analysis across Europe.

Figure 1: Innovation radar

An Employment Impact Intelligence Resource for Labour Market Planning

Employment effects are among the most immediate and visible consequences of CCAM deployment. One strand of the project conducted an ambitious macro-economic analysis of the emerging market trends providing scenarios, insights and implications for stakeholders to consider.

The findings show that the transition will involve both displacement and creation of roles. Tasks associated with driving and routine operations are likely to decline over time, while demand is expected to increase in areas such as software development, data analysis, system integration and maintenance of automated systems.

However, the project goes further by examining how these changes unfold over time and across regions. The impacts are not uniform. They vary depending on the pace of adoption, the maturity of infrastructure and the economic structure of different areas. This creates the potential for uneven outcomes, including regional disparities and shifts in income distribution.

The analysis also highlights qualitative changes in work. Job roles are expected to evolve, requiring new combinations of technical and operational skills. Entry-level opportunities may change, and traditional career pathways may be disrupted. These dynamics point to the importance of anticipating change rather than reacting to it.

As a resource, the employment analysis (available as a Power Bi data tool here) helps stakeholders move towards proactive workforce planning. It provides the evidence needed to design policies and business strategies that support both workers and innovation, ensuring that labour market transitions are managed rather than left to unfold unpredictably.

Figure 2: Employment model (Power Bi) interface

A Socio-Economic Assessment Framework for Strategic Decision Making

Beyond employment, CCAM ERAS explores the wider socio-economic implications of automated mobility systems. This includes how mobility services are accessed and distributed, how regions develop and how societal benefits and risks are balanced.

The analysis shows that CCAM has the potential to significantly improve accessibility, particularly for groups that currently face barriers to mobility. At the same time, there is a risk that benefits will not be evenly distributed. Differences in infrastructure readiness, policy approaches and investment priorities can lead to diverging outcomes between regions and user groups.

This reinforces the importance of governance choices. Socio-economic outcomes are not predetermined by technology. They are shaped by decisions related to planning, regulation and investment. Inclusive design and targeted policy interventions are essential to ensure that the benefits of CCAM are shared broadly.

The framework developed within the project allows stakeholders to assess CCAM initiatives through this wider lens. It encourages decision-makers to consider not only technical efficiency and safety, but also equity, accessibility, and long-term societal value. In doing so, it supports a more comprehensive and forward-looking approach to mobility planning.

A Skills Foresight and Development Instrument for Future Readiness

The project progressed to identify the types of competencies that will be required across the CCAM value chain, including technical expertise, digital skills and interdisciplinary capabilities that link engineering with operational and regulatory understanding. It also examines where current education and training systems fall short of these emerging requirements.

Building on this analysis, the project proposes practical schemes for reskilling and upskilling. These include modular training approaches that can be adapted to evolving needs, as well as frameworks for lifelong learning that support continuous workforce development. The emphasis is on flexibility and scalability, recognising that skills requirements will continue to change as technologies develop.

A key insight is that effective skills development requires close collaboration between industry, education providers and policymakers. Training programmes must be aligned with real-world demand, while also being accessible to a diverse workforce. The schemes developed within CCAM ERAS offer a starting point for achieving this alignment and for ensuring that human capital keeps pace with technological innovation.

Final event

The final event brought together all the project stakeholders and more to validate our results and explore future implications of the findings. A key message was that CCAM should not be understood simply as a technology that will replace workers. Instead, the transition is likely to reshape tasks, reduce or change some roles over time, and create new responsibilities linked to supervision, maintenance, safety, data, regulation and service management.

The discussions also highlighted that existing labour market pressures, especially driver shortages and an ageing workforce, strongly influence how automation should be interpreted. In some areas, CCAM may help address hard-to-fill or monotonous tasks, while human workers remain essential for complex, customer-facing, local and safety-critical situations.

Skills emerged as a central condition for successful deployment. Participants stressed the need for hybrid profiles that combine technical understanding with operational, regulatory and governance competences. This applies not only to companies, but also to public authorities, education providers and local administrations.

Finally, the event underlined the importance of planning CCAM as a fair and socially managed transition. Cities and authorities have a key role in steering deployment towards public value through procurement, regulation, integration with public transport and dialogue with operators. Evidence-based policy, coordinated training and institutional capacity-building will be essential to ensure that CCAM supports safe, inclusive and sustainable mobility.

Towards a Human Centric CCAM Future

Taken together, the outputs of CCAM ERAS form a coherent toolkit for navigating the socio-economic transformation associated with automated mobility.

The final output will be a policy road map and recommendations. Through an analysis of existing policy frameworks against the project’s findings, the project is identifying gaps where socio-economic aspects are not sufficiently addressed. It then proposes a methodology for incorporating these considerations into decision making, policy making, and capacity building ensuring that regulation reflects the full needs of the emerging opportunity.

Find out more and access all the research, findings, and deliverables. Please visit the project website CCAM-ERAS – Building towards the future.