Passenger Attendants

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Securing a wheelchair with four-point tiedowns on a moving van, guiding a blind rider to a seat, and physically calming a dispute are not digitisable, but the tasks that fill the rest of the shift — fare validation, stop announcements, ticket scanning, headcount, incident logging — have already been replaced by tap gates, GPS-triggered PA and onboard cameras on most systems, which pulls it down from the high teens to 13.

Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. You are on your feet in a vehicle in motion, kneeling on wet floors, working lift ramps in rain and ice, and bracing passengers on curbside grades — uncontrolled enough for a 15, short of 18+ only because the environment is a bounded vehicle interior rather than open terrain or an unpredictable worksite.

No licence, no signature requirement. No state licence attaches to the role; a CPR/first-aid card, wheelchair-securement training and a transit agency background check are the whole gate, and when something goes wrong the FTA-regulated agency and the CDL-holding driver absorb the claim, not you — the 4 rather than 0 reflects that securement certification is contractually mandatory on ADA paratransit runs.

Some relationship component. Regular paratransit and school-route riders come to know their attendant by name and elderly passengers ask for the same person, which is real, but the agency assigns runs and no rider chooses you or follows you to another route — that makes it 9, not the 13+ of a role where the relationship itself is what is purchased.

Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. Most calls are scripted by agency policy: fare disputes go by posted rules, medical events trigger a radio call to dispatch and 911, evacuation follows a drilled sequence — the discretion you do exercise is real (deciding a rider is too impaired to board, when to stop the vehicle) but it is narrow and immediately escalated, which is why it sits at 6 rather than 10.