EXPOSED
The core task — moving a vehicle along a repeated route — is the single most-funded automation target in the world, and fixed-route airport and campus shuttles are exactly the geofenced, low-speed case driverless systems handle first. What holds the job up is everything around the wheel: loading luggage, securing wheelchairs, handling a confused or intoxicated passenger, reading a client's mood in the back seat, and being the person a hotel or executive office is willing to answer for. Chauffeur permits and DOT medical cards slow entry but are not a strong legal shield, and the modal worker here is a shuttle driver, not a black-car chauffeur with a repeat client book.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Driving a fixed loop between terminal and rental lot at 15 mph is squarely inside what Waymo and May Mobility already run in revenue service, but the same shift includes lifting 50-lb bags into a bay, ratcheting down a wheelchair to WC19 anchor points, and waking a passenger who slept past their stop — physical service tasks that keep this above the 6-and-under band without getting near 14.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. The work happens in airport curbside crush, snow-covered hotel driveways and unlit residential streets, with the driver out of the seat opening doors, deploying a lift, and standing in traffic to load — an uncontrolled outdoor environment, though the route itself is known and repeated, which is why this is 15 and not 19.
Certification preferred, not legally required. A CDL with passenger endorsement or a local chauffeur/TCP permit plus a DOT medical card is a real gate — you can be pulled off the road for a BP reading or a positive test — but the operating authority and the insurance sit with the hotel, casino or shuttle contractor, so no personal licence stands between the employer and a claim.
Some relationship component. Regulars on a hospital or employee shuttle learn your name and a black-car client may request you specifically, but airport and parking-lot riders board whatever van is next and never see the same driver twice, so the relationship is a retention factor for some of the workforce rather than the product being sold.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. Route, stop order, headway and dispatch calls come from the schedule board or the app, and the genuinely discretionary moments — refusing an over-intoxicated passenger, deciding a lane is too iced to attempt — are bounded by company policy and a radio call to dispatch, which is discretion of the reportable kind, not ownership of an ambiguous high-stakes call.
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