Ensuring that automated buses and shuttles serves everyone has been at the core of the SINFONICA project. Over the past three years, the project placed user needs at the centre of its work, focusing on people with mobility challenges. Concluding in August 2025, the project leaves behind a strong legacy for more inclusive deployment of Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility (CCAM) in Europe.
Engaging with citizens to co-create CCAM solutions
SINFONICA engaged with a wide range of citizens and stakeholders to gain a deeper understanding of their needs related to new mobility services and ensure that innovation serves everyone. The project developed innovative methods to engage users and diverse stakeholders to co-create CCAM solutions that are inclusive and tailored for all. This co-creation approach helps build trust in CCAM systems and ensure that future deployment is socially inclusive and more widely accepted.
Engagement activities in the project’s four Groups of Interest in Trikala (Greece), Hamburg (Germany), the West Midlands (UK), and Noord-Brabant (Netherlands) helped test and validate the project’s participatory approach and provided valuable feedback to further define its tools and recommendations. The project focused its efforts on reaching and engaging with the following target groups: elderly people, individuals with disabilities, low-income communities, migrants, digitally excluded individuals, and rural residents, among others.
Between October 2023 and June 2024, the project carried out 290 individual interviews with vulnerable groups, 36 focus groups with citizens, and 12 workshops with different stakeholders in its four Groups of Interest, with a total of about 1,000 participants. To complement this, the project also conducted a Europe-wide online survey that collected nearly 4,500 responses in 12 weeks, broadening the perspective on user concerns and expectations.
“Research, innovation and deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems and services, including automation and CCAM, is not only about technology that delivers efficient, clean and safe mobility, but also about the user aspects. With an increasingly diverse, as well as ageing, population, it is important for transport systems to be accepted and user-friendly for everyone. SINFONICA has been an important complement to the more technology-driven projects covered by the ERTICO Partnership and within the CCAM Partnership, to ensure that mobility advancements work for all that that nobody is left behind,” comments Andrew Winder, Senior Manager at ERTICO.
Recommendations for inclusive CCAM deployment
An important outcome of SINFONICA is a set of concrete recommendations and guidance for more inclusive mobility, ensuring that the project’s learnings continue to inform future development. ERTICO played a central role in drafting these recommendations and will use the knowledge gained in ongoing and future projects.
The recommendations cover a broad range of topics, such as how to ensure accessible and transparent communication with users, operational good practices, vehicle and service design, as well as policy recommendations for public authorities to support regulatory frameworks.
The recommendations are available on the SINFONICA website.
The SINFONICA tools to support future deployment
Beyond its recommendations, SINFONICA delivered practical tools to help policymakers, service providers and other stakeholders design more inclusive CCAM services.
The SINFONICA Knowledge Map Explorer is a unique decision-support tool that gathers the project’s recommendations and outcomes in one place. The tool allows users to navigate project results by geographical area, target group, or type of stakeholder, and provides tailored, actionable guidance. While primarily designed for policymakers and service providers, the tool is publicly accessible online for all interested stakeholders.
The second simulation tool, the SINFONICA CCAM Designer, offers advanced modelling capabilities to test and evaluate different CCAM scenarios before real-world deployment. It is also available online here.
SINFONICA Final Event: celebrating the conclusion of three years of social science research into CCAM
On 28 August, SINFONICA marked its conclusion with a Final Event held in Brussels, gathering 70 participants. The event provided a platform to discuss insights and lessons learned from the project’s participatory approach and its implementation in the Groups of Interest and exchange with invited experts on future perspectives for inclusive CCAM. Participants could also discover and interact with the project’s tools through an interactive marketplace.
The event also included a panel discussion with related EU-funded projects that will build on the SINFONICA insights. The invited projects included two coordinated by ERTICO: CulturalRoad, which is developing new guidelines for the equitable deployment of CCAM services that take into account the needs of diverse populations, and FAME, which concluded recently in June 2025 and is now followed by a new CCAM Partnership Coordination and Support Action (CSA), CCAMbassador. These discussions helped ensure that the knowledge generated in SINFONICA continues to drive further the future of automated mobility, keeping alive the project’s commitment to “leaving no one behind”.
