The Hellenic Institute of Transportation Engineers (HITE) and the Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT/CERTH) co-organised the 10th International Congress on Transportation Research (ICTR 2021), which was held on September 1st – 3rd 2021, at the Mediterranean Hotel in Rhodes, Greece. The spotlight theme of the 2021 Congress was “Future Mobility and Resilient Transport: Transition to innovation”.
The Conference started with a series of workshops, one of which was devoted to CCAM, the so-called Challenges & Lessons Learned in CCAM, organized by SHOW, and specifically by the Technical Management team of the Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT) of CERTH. There were twelve presentations made – some of which originated from regular papers of the Conference and some of which being invited speeches – whereas the workshop closed with a round table. The work presented originated from SPACE, SHOW, AVENUE, WISE-ACT, Drive2theFuture, Trustonomy, SUaaVE, ICT4CART, EIMANTRA, LEVITATE, SPROUT and ARCADE initiatives as well as from CCAM Platform WG3.
The round table was moderated by Dr. Evangelos Bekiaris and Dr. Maria Gkemou from CERTH/HIT. Six renowned experts in the field participated and exchanged their views on two topics, namely User Acceptance in CCAM and Road safety & sustainable, safe and road-worthy CCAM services.
The workshop round-table discussion concluded that automated mobility cannot be seen that it targets road safety alone; it should be rather seen as a holistic new paradigm that has to fit and enable sustainable mobility and target at the same time safety, efficiency and environmental targets in a competitive and flourishing for businesses manner. Whichever solution comes should be co-created by design, with all stakeholders involved, whereas it is necessary for the CCAM community, encompassing research, academia, industry but also authorities, to convey the message of the new paradigm to the citizens in a clear and transparent way, which does not seem to be the case till now. Furthermore, CCAM language itself, even in the CCAM different community cohorts, is not yet homogeneous.
It has become clear that CCAM priority field of deployment, with respect to the need behind but also to the current readiness, should be Public Transport and the peripheral modes of it.
Automated mobility can certainly increase road safety, as it by design eliminates the human factor, and, as such, the error associated to it. Still, this does not necessarily equal to reliable and interoperable services. It is thus clear that CCAM should be competitive and is not to be accepted per se. The new services have to offer value added and their competitive advantage should be clear to the travelers, which tend to be stricter with any novel concept intervening in old ways of living and, in this case, moving. User acceptance alone is a rather complicated topic as there is it deals among other with what is the perceived user acceptance and how this perception is gained.