EXPOSED
The core loop — monitor radio and sensors, log vessel passages, sequence gates and signals, open and close on a schedule — is exactly the kind of supervisory control that sensors, PLCs, and centralized remote operations centers already handle; the Panama Canal and multiple US state DOTs run bridges remotely today. What keeps the job alive is physical presence at the structure: clearing debris, greasing and hand-cranking balky machinery, spotting a barge that's drifting wrong, and being the person on site when the electronics fail. Coast Guard drawbridge regulations still mandate attended operation on many spans, but those rules are being waived for remote control one bridge at a time, so this shield is eroding by policy, not by technology.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $50,110 → $57,700 -7.9% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-3.3% 2,900 → 2,800 on the projections basis
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -3.3% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~300 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
LockmanLevermanBridgemanDam TenderLock KeeperLock MasterLock TenderDam OperatorDam RepairerBridge OpenerBridge TenderDam AttendantDraw OperatorLock OperatorLock RepairerGate AttendantBridge LevermanBridge OperatorCrossing TenderStation GatemanCrossing WatchmanDrawbridge TenderLighthouse KeeperBridge Crew Member
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: trust premium .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Sequencing gates, barriers, and signals to a published opening schedule and logging vessel names and times in a bridge log are already PLC-and-camera work on remotely operated spans in Florida, Michigan, and Illinois; the 8 rather than a 3 comes from the tasks that still need a body at the pier — chipping ice off a bascule leaf, clearing driftwood from a lock gate recess, hand-cranking to seat a bridge when the drive motor trips, and reading a tug captain's intent by eye when the radio is garbled.
Some physical or field component You work in an operator's house with screens, radio, and control console for most of a shift, which caps this well below a lineman's score, but the 11 reflects the rest: walking the span to verify traffic gates dropped, greasing trunnion bearings and rack teeth, hauling debris out of miter gates, and doing it in the weather on a structure over moving water where wind, ice, and current don't wait for you.
Certification preferred, not legally required There is no operator licence for this — most tenders are trained on the structure and qualified by the owning agency or DOT, and while 33 CFR Part 117 sets bridge opening duties and the Coast Guard can cite violations, the citation lands on the bridge owner, not on your personal credential, which is why this sits at 6 and not in licensed-professional territory.
Meaningful discretion Most of the shift runs on written procedure — scheduled openings, signal sequences, radio protocols under Part 117 — but the 7 covers the calls that are genuinely yours: refusing or delaying an opening when a vehicle is stalled on the leaf, deciding whether an approaching barge has enough control to make the gap, and choosing to hold the bridge closed for an ambulance run against a waiting vessel.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (8/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (6/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (3/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (7/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 16 of this occupation's 35 points (46%).
Embodiment (11/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 53/100, still EXPOSED.
State DOT or bridge-authority collective bargaining language (AFSCME/Teamsters units cover tenders at NY, NJ, MA, FL, WA agencies) that ties remote-control conversion to minimum on-structure staffing or bars elimination of the attendant classification for the contract term. This is already the standard defensive clause pattern in transit and toll-collection agreements.
Genuine two-tier split exists: scheduled openings and vessel logging automate cleanly, while fault diagnosis on 80-year-old bascule and swing machinery, hand-cranking a jammed span, and reading an unpowered barge's actual drift do not. If the surviving roles are the ones stationed at the oldest non-standardized movable spans, the residual task mix is the judgment and troubleshooting tier.
A Coast Guard rulemaking under 33 CFR 117 that sets conditions on remote-operation authorizations — e.g. requiring a named, on-site qualified attendant during defined vessel seasons, or during any camera/comms degradation — rather than granting span-by-span waivers. A single serious allision or entrapment at a remotely operated draw span (of the kind that already drives NTSB marine recommendations) is the realistic trigger for CG to tighten rather than loosen these authorizations.
Formalizing the tender as the designated on-scene decision-maker in the structure's emergency action plan — authority to refuse or force an opening for a distressed vessel, to hold traffic during flood or hurricane evacuation sequencing, and to declare the span out of service. Where agencies write named-role authority into EAPs (as several state DOTs did after post-Key Bridge vulnerability reviews), the call stops being schedule execution and becomes an owned judgment.
Job-description merger with bridge mechanic/electrician duties as the monitoring tier is centralized — hands-on greasing, span-lock and miter-rail adjustment, debris and ice clearing, generator and backup-drive testing become the whole job rather than filler between openings. This raises embodiment only where the agency reclassifies and pays the maintenance rate; if it instead assigns those duties to a roving crew covering ten spans, the effect is fewer positions, not a higher score.
The limit. No route to trust premium — vessel operators and motorists have no ability to select or pay for a human tender, and the buyer is a single public agency under budget pressure. Also note the total is capped by scale: roughly 3,000 positions concentrated in a handful of agencies means one procurement decision per agency can eliminate a large share of the occupation regardless of how the dimensions score.
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 120 | $73,110 +27% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 120 | $54,720 -5% |
| Pittsburgh, PA | 110 | $68,810 +19% |
| New Orleans-Metairie, LA | 90 | $39,110 -32% |
| Davenport-Moline-Rock Island, IA-IL | 50 | $70,890 +23% |
| Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI | 50 | $35,000 -39% |
| Baton Rouge, LA | 40 | $69,970 +21% |
| Cleveland, OH | 40 | $44,500 -23% |
| Lafayette, LA | 30 | $75,340 +31% |
| St. Louis, MO-IL | 30 | $74,480 +29% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 120 | $73,110 +27% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 35. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.