EXPOSED
This is a residual BLS bucket — airport ramp and gate support, transit station and platform staff, bridge and lock tenders, vehicle marshals, transport helpers — so the modal worker spends most hours on their feet in terminals, yards, and roadways rather than at a screen. That physical, weather-exposed, unpredictable-environment work is what current robotics cannot cheaply replicate, and it's the main thing holding the score up. The exposure comes from the other side: the paperwork, dispatch logs, manifest checks, and passenger-information duties are already automatable, and there is no license or personal liability protecting the role, so employers can thin headcount through automated gates, sensors, kiosks, and remote monitoring.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
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
+3.8%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 13,550 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 +3.8% 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.
~1,200 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
FuelerRampmanRefuelerCheck PilotShop WorkerFlag SignalerFlag SignalmanPedicab DriverRamp AttendantRickshaw DriverPilot InstructorAirplane RefuelerElevator OperatorFlying InstructorGasoline AttendantAirplane Pilot HelperAirport Ramp AttendantAirport Utility WorkerCable Ferryboat OperatorJinriksha Driver (Rickshaw)Food or Baggage Handling Rampman
The BLS uses Transportation Workers, All Other for work that doesn't fit any named occupation, so it covers roles that have little in common with each other. Two consequences worth knowing before you read anything below:
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Chocking an aircraft, hooking a tow bar, clearing debris off a lock gate, or physically flagging a bus into a bay resists digitisation, but the same shift includes reading manifests, logging arrival times, radioing dispatch, and answering platform passenger queries — duties already handled by automated gate systems, RFID and kiosks, which is why this sits at 13 rather than 17.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments Ramp and platform work happens outdoors in jet blast, rain, ice and diesel exhaust, with lifting, coupling, climbing, and walking live roadways or track — the environment is uncontrolled and changes hourly, though it stops short of 20 because the sites are fixed, mapped, employer-controlled facilities rather than open terrain.
No licence, no signature requirement Most of these jobs need only an employer-issued badge, a SIDA or airport security clearance, and a DOT medical or CDL in some slots — no state licence, no personal certification you carry between employers, and no statutory duty that makes you rather than the carrier answerable for an incident.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs Ramp signals, wing-walk procedures, chock and gate sequences, lock operating schedules and platform emergency steps are written down in SOPs and checklists, and the real calls — hold the aircraft, close the bridge, cancel the run — are escalated to a supervisor, dispatcher or controller, leaving discretion mostly in the timing and pace of executing set steps.
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 (13/20 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 (4/20) 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 (6/20) 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 45 points (36%).
Embodiment (16/20) 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 59/100, still EXPOSED.
If the routine tier (manifest checks, gate logs, passenger info) is stripped out by kiosks and sensors, the residual role becomes irregular-operations judgment: deciding to stop a pushback, halting a train on a platform-edge call, refusing a load, evacuating a station. Transit agency contracts and NTSB findings that formalize station/platform staff as the designated on-scene decision-maker for emergencies — as some rail agencies did after platform-death investigations — codify this.
Same two-tier shift: once clerical duties are automated, what remains is exception handling in weather, equipment failure, and crowd events, which current systems cannot resolve end to end. This raises the score only because the denominator changed, and typically comes with fewer positions.
Federal or state rules that name a specific credentialed on-site human as the required signer for safety-critical transport acts — e.g. FAA requiring a trained, badged marshaller/wing-walker present for pushback and ramp movements rather than camera-only clearance, or USACE/Coast Guard rules keeping a licensed lock/bridge tender personally responsible for vessel-passage decisions rather than remote consolidated control. TSA/DOT security-badge regimes (SIDA authority, chain-of-custody for cargo screening) extended to make the badge-holder the accountable party for AI-flagged anomalies would do the same.
Rules that require a physical human presence irrespective of sensing capability — e.g. state transit bills mandating staffed stations/booths (as fought over in NYC and Bay Area transit contracts), or ADA enforcement actions requiring in-person assistance for wheelchair boarding and unaccompanied minors rather than call buttons.
The limit. No realistic route to a trust premium: passengers and shippers do not choose a carrier because a human marshals the aircraft or tends the lock, and the buyer is an employer minimizing headcount. Any gains here are regulatory or contractual, not market-driven, and a residual SOC bucket means each sub-occupation moves separately — the aggregate score may barely shift even if ramp or lock work is protected.
| Memphis, TN-MS-AR | 440 | $56,870 +25% |
| Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas, NV | 430 | $37,340 -18% |
| Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin, TN | 430 | $38,240 -16% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 390 | $44,070 -3% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 380 | $49,710 +9% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 370 | $55,800 +22% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 350 | $36,370 -20% |
| Baton Rouge, LA | 330 | $45,920 +1% |
| Ogden, UT | 30 | $70,490 +54% |
| Urban Honolulu, HI | 150 | $65,600 +44% |
| San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA | 40 | $61,460 +35% |
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 45. 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.