COOKED
The core task — driving a passenger from A to B, plus fare calculation, routing, and dispatch response — is the single task the AV industry has spent $100B+ to automate, and Waymo already runs paid driverless rides at scale in Phoenix, SF, LA, and Austin. Embodiment normally protects, but here the robot is the product: a car on mapped urban roads is a far easier physical problem than a crawl space or an ICU. What survives near-term is the human-contact residue: wheelchair and stretcher assistance, luggage, unaccompanied minors, medical transport, and airport/hotel runs where a named driver with a phone number is the service.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
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.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+11.1%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 41,050 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +11.1% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
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.
~22,600 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
DriverHackerVan OwnerCab DriverVan DriverHack DriverLyft DriverTaxi DriverTransporterVan OperatorPedicab DriverShuttle DriverTaxicab DriverRickshaw DriverTaxi Cab DriverBicycle Taxi DriverTransportation AideRideshare Cab DriverTransportation DriverWheelchair Van DriverLimo Driver (Limousine Driver)
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: judgment & accountability .
Core tasks are already automatable Fare metering, dispatch acceptance, GPS routing and lane-keeping are all shipped features in a Waymo or Zoox vehicle today, which puts this at 6 rather than 0 only because curbside pickup in double-parked traffic, loading a folded wheelchair into a trunk, and dealing with a passenger who vomits or won't get out still need hands.
Some physical or field component You are in a vehicle on public roads all shift — lifting suitcases, assisting elderly riders in and out, occasionally shoveling snow off the hood — but the road itself is mapped, signed, and geometrically constrained, which is why this sits at 11 instead of the 16+ of a lineman on a pole or a plumber under a house.
Certification preferred, not legally required A chauffeur endorsement or TLC hack licence is a city permit with a background check and a medical, not a professional licence that makes you personally answerable for an outcome; the fleet's commercial policy and the TNC's insurance absorb the claim, so at 5 the paperwork barely slows a driverless competitor down.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs Route choice, when to refuse an intoxicated fare, and how to handle a no-show are governed by company policy, meter rules, and municipal regs, and a supervisor or the app resolves disputes — the discretion is real but small-stakes and reversible, hence 4.
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 (6/20 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 (5/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (6/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (4/20) 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 15 of this occupation's 32 points (47%).
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.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to taxi drivers on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
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 56/100 — EXPOSED.
State Medicaid NEMT rules or CMS guidance requiring a credentialed attendant (CPR, PASS/wheelchair-securement certified) physically present for stretcher and wheelchair transports, with that attendant named on the trip record — making the human, not the vehicle vendor, the liable party for the passenger's condition in transit.
Task-mix shift: if curb-to-curb mapped-road trips go driverless first, the residual paid work is the tier AVs handle badly — wheelchair securement, stretcher loading, unaccompanied minors, dialysis and discharge runs, and door-through-door assistance under ADA paratransit contracts. This raises task resistance without any new law, but only for the fraction of the workforce holding those contracts.
Growth of the WAV/paratransit share of the occupation: ramp deployment, four-point tiedowns, transfers, and stair assistance in unpredictable residential settings are physical work no current AV fleet performs. FTA ADA complementary paratransit requirements and city WAV mandates (e.g., TLC's WAV dispatch percentage) keep this demand contractual rather than optional.
A state statute requiring a licensed human operator in any commercial passenger AV — California AB 316 (Teamsters-backed) passed the legislature in 2023 and was vetoed by Newsom; a re-passed version surviving veto, or a similar bill in NY/MA/IL, would convert the driver into a legally mandated seat-holder. Watch also NYC TLC's AV permit rule, which currently requires a licensed safety driver behind the wheel for testing.
Narrow but real: buyers who specifically pay for a named human — school-district contracts for unaccompanied minors, executive/black-car accounts where the same driver is assigned, and hospital discharge transport where a family requests a person. Verifiable as a price gap between a Waymo fare and a booked human car service on the same route.
If medical-transport contracts formalize the driver as the person who decides whether a patient is fit to travel, when to divert to an ED, and whether a minor may be released to a given adult — with that call logged and auditable — the role owns consequential ambiguous decisions rather than executing a dispatch.
The limit. Even with every lever, this occupation's ceiling is low and the gains are concentrated in the paratransit/NEMT/medical-escort slice, not general street-hail or app taxi work. A safety-driver mandate is the only lever large enough to matter at scale, and it is a single legislative fight that has already been lost once in California; it also decays over time as AV safety records accumulate. The A-to-B core task is gone in permitted metros and no institutional lever brings it back.
| Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas, NV | 2,960 | $44,800 +6% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 230 | $35,290 -16% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 150 | $36,770 -13% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 150 | $37,420 -11% |
| Milwaukee-Waukesha, WI | 140 | $28,530 -32% |
| Kansas City, MO-KS | 130 | $38,020 -10% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 100 | $35,000 -17% |
| La Crosse-Onalaska, WI-MN | 70 | $27,920 -34% |
| Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas, NV | 2,960 | $44,800 +6% |
| Kansas City, MO-KS | 130 | $38,020 -10% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 150 | $37,420 -11% |
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