Parking Attendants

Park vehicles or issue tickets for customers in a parking lot or garage. May park or tend vehicles in environments such as a car dealership or rental car facility. May collect fee.

The occupation of "Parking Attendants" is assessed to have an automation risk of 28.1%, which aligns closely with its base risk of 28.3%. This relatively moderate risk level can be attributed to the mix of tasks involved, some of which are straightforward to automate, while others still require human intervention. The most automatable tasks include taking numbered tags from customers, locating vehicles, delivering vehicles, or providing customers with instructions for locating their cars. These processes are repetitive and could be streamlined using automated ticketing systems, license plate recognition, or vehicle retrieval robots. Additionally, inspecting vehicles for damage is becoming easier with the advent of high-resolution imaging and AI-powered visual recognition systems. Greeting customers and opening car doors can also be partially automated through the use of robotic attendants or smart kiosks. Despite these technical advances, several core job duties for parking attendants remain resistant to automation. Lifting, positioning, and removing barricades to open or close parking areas often require physical dexterity and situational awareness that can challenge current robotic solutions, especially in outdoor or dynamically changing environments. Performing maintenance on cars in storage to protect tires, batteries, or exteriors demands hands-on skills, judgment, and the ability to respond to unique situations in real time. Escorting customers to their vehicles to ensure their safety is another important human-centric role, as it involves personal interaction, empathy, and situational judgment, especially in environments where security is a concern. These resistant tasks help lower the total automation risk for the occupation, as they entail physical and interpersonal demands not easily replicated by machines. Another important factor slowing down the automation of parking attendants’ work is the requirement for originality, though it is present at relatively low levels (2.0% and 1.8%). Originality, or the ability to generate new ideas and respond to novel situations, remains a bottleneck skill that automation struggles to replicate effectively. While routines and standardized procedures can be encoded into machines, responding to unexpected situations or customer needs often requires creative problem-solving that humans do better than algorithms. As long as parking attendants are called upon to deal with complex or one-off issues, such as unique customer requests or unexpected maintenance challenges, their role will retain a degree of automation resilience. This interplay between the highly automatable and resistant tasks is key to understanding why the overall risk of automation for "Parking Attendants" remains at a moderate 28.1%.