Delivery robots take over Chicago sidewalks
blockclubchicago.org
blockclubchicago.org
I will also say, people riding electric scooters shouldn't be zooming along at 20mph (or pedal bikes) on sidewalks either, which are a true safety hazard.
And on the other side, much better for our environment, to have a lighter weight robot delivering a burrito than a 2,000lb vehicle, in terms of net energy consumption/expenditure.
Using 2,000lb vehicles for last-mile burrito delivery is a "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" scenario. Delivery robots are an improvement because literally anything is.
Because bicycles use 5x less energy per mile than electric scooters, which would be a reasonable analogue for slow electric delivery robots [0].
> It is very inefficient (approx 25%) to use food as an energy source,
By comparison, fossil fuel conversions are about 30-45%, depending on the energy source [1].
> and humans are always burning energy. They can't turn off at night or when they are idle. I think it is very likely that the robot would be better for the environment than the person.
That's a really, really weird baseline to use. Turning off a robot when not performing a task is standard procedure. Turning off a human when not performing a task is not standard procedure, and is frowned upon in polite society.
[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/28710/energy-efficiency-of-mo...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_01.html (Smaller numbers are better. To find efficiency, divide 3412 (1 kilowatt*hour in Btu) by the value in the column [2].)
This is your mind on HN.
Well for one thing, the robot doesn't need to exist at all. Humans are going to be eating and breathing regardless of demand for burrito delivery.
$500 per adult per month (~$1.4T) - existing welfare.
for $1000 per month it would cost $3.1T.
What about the children? $1,200 for every adult + $400 for every child 4.1 trillion/year
The federal budget is 6 trillion/year.
There would need to be deflation for 1,200 a month to have the buying power of the average income now. Right now that's minimum wage.
Oceans filled with plastic would be "good" for something. Just probably not us. Maybe robots?
The extend to which some people get food delivered is absurd. I'm sure there exceptions and reasons and everything, but seriously.
Convenience services thrive in America because it's the only way the working class can claw back a teensy bit of time and energy. We could have had hybrid or even remote work, but that dream is dead. Traffic sucks, outside is loud and stinky, and you're in the office minimum 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. Minimum. I actually don't know anyone who works that little.
More than getting uppity online about others' personal dining choices?
We've had these delivery robots for about six months now, and they've grown to the point where I see hundreds of delivery robots on the sidewalks each week. Scores of them daily. They're flooding our city, making the long commutes people don't want to.
The reason this is great is that Atlanta's infrastructure is car-centric and spread too far apart to make walking or even biking make sense.
The biking infrastructure we have does no good when it rains and you're twenty minutes from your destination. That same infrastructure also doesn't serve our children or our elderly. Or help when you're sick or tired and need a pick me up.
It's easy to order for a group of people from one of these. To imagine the same group of four people hopping on bikes together to travel twenty minutes to food - that's never once happened in my life. Only certain types of people bike, and you'll invariably find yourself in groups with lots of non-cyclists.
I feel that cyclist culture is bright eyed and idealistic, but not practical. You need a city designed around it, and all the people need to grow up loving it. These delivery robots, Waymo, Lime bikes - they're much more sensible middle grounds for cities like ours. Where people can't bike, or simply don't want to.
A medium speed robot in the bike lane in the worst case causes a fatal or broken-bone accident.
These delivery companies are being subsidized by our already-limited pedestrian infrastructure.
Also, no human should have to move out of the way or trip over some someone's burrito delivery robot.
It's just not a meaningful way to think of infrastructure. The point of infrastructure is that it benefits society, and it will benefit some people more than others. Nice sidewalks benefit the rich people who live there more than they do the poor people who have to drive from the suburbs to work there.
And this business about "have to move out of the way" is really a bit much. If they're impeding the disabled then that's of some significance, and ensuring that those who need wheelchair access can still get places is worth it, but any able-bodied person can easily step aside.
I find the online reaction to so much of this stuff hard to fathom. Occasionally, I'll walk by a Lime / Bird scooter that's fallen over and I just pick it up and place it on the side. The net gain to society of having easy-to-access last-mile transportation is probably much greater than this happening occasionally. I really think these things are far overblown. But if you go online, you'd think that sidewalks are completely unwalkable. I principally walk and bike (now e-bike) places and this has never been a problem either in San Francisco or London - both cities where a large contingent has constantly insisted that it is.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ht-M!,f_auto,q_auto:...
I am receptive to the argument that deliveries made in cars are wasteful. I ride a bike exclusively, I am not a fan of delivery drivers jumping out of double parked cars all over town, let alone the environmental impact. But much like rental e-scooters being abandoned on sidewalks, these claim to solve some problem by creating new problems and making the common environment worse principally to create profit for the owners.
And before anyone starts yapping bout NIMBYs: the sidewalk is in the front yard, stupid.
Edit: y’all, no bullshit I wrote this message and then left the house and ran into a Coco branded RC delivery bot at Grand and Ogden, stuck in the snow in the only walkable portion of the sidewalk, unable to get itself out and forcing me to walk around it in the snow. So there’s a little live reporting on the situation in the streets.
I offered no aid.
I had guessed it was stopped because it came to an unshoveled portion of the sidewalk. If it can't traverse that, it's not made for this city
I'm not fundamentally mad as these bots. But if they don't figure out how to make them work with other pedestrians, then I'm going to start cheering on any vandalism delivered upon them.
Have them partner with the city and collect evidence of unshoveled sidewalks. Automatically issue fines based off the collected video evidence.
This is one of those things where if these bots cannot traverse a section of sidewalk, many with mobility issues cannot either. And it's endemic to the city.
In my neighborhood there are $5m+ houses that literally never shovel their sidewalk the entire year, as well as a few businesses on "main drag" retail corridors. Fines for this have become exceptionally rare to non existent.
Fewer drivers on the road because the pavements are becoming non-navigable because of robots nearly as wide as pavements does not sound like a benefit for anyone but drivers, and yet again demonstrates how messed up car culture is.
"Normal" people can walk around at least. How about wheelchair-bound, blind, old/frail for whom walking up down iced/snowy sidewalk edge onto a pavement with moving cars may be an issue, etc. ?
nitpicking a bit, but this reads as they are the robots doing the inserting instead of the companies creating/operating them and not giving a damn about this.
I came upon one as I was jogging last night and was worried about getting around it. It, or someone driving it, seemed to notice me coming and it waited at a spot where it was easy to pass.
That said, these are a bad idea. Like another commenter mentioned, these are going to obstruct people with mobility issues or devices, or obstruct everyone when all but a narrow strip of sidewalk is snow and ice.
My teens call them “clankers” and are by no means fans of them. I’m surprised those things aren’t constantly stolen or vandalized.
hate those things. I'm ready to start kicking them out the way
How do other people you know feel about them?
Do you see them get vandalized or messed with?
> So there’s a little live reporting on the situation in the streets.
> I offered no aid.
I just want to say I find this writing style refreshing as it’s a bit out of distribution for typical HN comments. Anyway, thanks for sharing your experience.
All anyone has to do is look across the land
> A delivery robot collided with a disabled man on L.A. street. The aftermath is getting ugly
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-09-25/viral-vi...
You employ an interesting definition of "solved."
so I’m having this discussion with parts of the country half a decade behind and this is the level of nuance as if it was half a decade ago? Is that what’s happening? Because thats even funnier
Assuming a dozen robots per location, that's less than eight deliveries per day per robot (and even that might be beyond their upper bound, actually, given their speed and range).
But then they didn't do it all in one year. So… it doesn't feel like a stretch.
Given how many will be recurring customers with recurring journey routes, it feels barely enough to encounter all the possible unique problems.
We're not talking about all the "Possible unique problems", we're just talking about the really obvious ones that are easy to think up .
Limited rollout and obviously an ideal environment, but these things are nowhere near new.
Los Angeles, including Santa Monica, LA City, West Hollywood others
Been around since 2020, multiple companies here
They’ve all gone through several iterations, debates, and approvals to reach symbiosis
People are already pissed off about delivery ebike riders, who disobey laws and ride dangerously. But there's very little you can do about humans. A helpless robot that is causing a hazard to pedestrians? A ULEZ-style strike force will be mobilized to drive them out.
And what about blind and partially sighted people? The place for wheeled vehicles in on roads. If you want to exist in pedestrian areas then make a robot that can walk.
But putting that aside, the biggest problems these things will have in the UK is a completely different conception of walkability even compared to, say, NYC.
People walk everywhere, pavements are cluttered and crowded, the vast majority of roads are not grid-structured almost anywhere in the UK, etc. So much so that when US firms do consider testing these things properly in the UK they will have to pick somewhere like Bath or Worthing or Hove: enough wealthy people to try it, and easy, grid-structured roads. Not many other good candidates.
The second problem they will face is the nature of protest. People won’t vandalise them. There will, however, be extensive civil mischief: people will box them in, mislead them, cover their sensors with googly eyes and woolly hats, put traffic cones on them, and generally make the whole scheme unworkable. And that is if councils don’t outright ban their operators.
Maybe they could enter the sidewalk for half a block at a curb cut like a cyclist would do to complete a delivery.
Or maybe you can ride them like a bronco?
This issue is going to become an issue with AVs too, if availability is the value prop and number of vehicles creates the availability and there are no humans to drive, I presume we end up with another situation where sidewalks across the world were littered with thousands of those lime/bird scooter things.
https://www.therobotreport.com/toronto-city-council-votes-to...
A single startup with cooler sized robots tottering down the sidewalk is fine. When every single delivery company gets on board then we have a shit load of those things kicking around and in the way. I have the same issues in cities with those scooters that get left all over the place.
It's not the city's responsibility to do that. If your business depends on particular actions by a city's legislature, it's generally on you to be reading their agenda.
This seems to be a false dichotomy. Isn't it obvious that if there weren't robots, there would be people delivering your food instead? And as a biker, I actually find delivery drivers to be quite dangerous. They are constantly blocking the bike lane, forcing me to drive into traffic -- or they are riding their extremely heavy and fast bikes dangerously through the bike lane, which is particularly frustrating as the bike lane should be designed to keep me safe.
I don't know. I mean, there are definitely worse evils than delivery drivers in SF, but if you're going to argue that robots are objectively worse, I'm not so sure.
If those delivery drivers were parked on the sidewalk, it would be a different discussion. Or if the robots were in the bike lane, we'd be saying "bike lanes are for bikes, not robots".
Robots are becoming worse. I've been living in Mountain View for more than 2 decades, and Waymo cars have been around for years. They never been an issue until recently. I already wrote how several weeks ago our car was almost front-rammed by a Waymo, we had to swerve to avoid it. And recently i saw, and today was myself cut by a Waymo when i was driving in a left turn lane with the Waymo very aggressively crossing the solid white line to get in front of me. I can't remember actual humans cutting it that close, and it was the first time in many years i expressed my frustration by using horn while especially feeling how stupid that horn for AV. That my anecdotal experience much dovetails with some autonomous companies recently stating about increasing of the "assertiveness" of their AVs.
I mean i've been predicting that robots on the battlefield will soon push people out as people can't compete on speed, precision, etc. Yet, it seems that it may happen on public roads faster than on the battlefield. Don't get me wrong, i'm not objecting against such unavoidable robot future (it would be stupid and pointless to object to unavoidable), i just want parity, i.e. the law should allow me to outfit my car with similar (or may be for the old time sake of being a human - with better) sensor and mechanical capabilities and to allow me to for example cut the same way in front of humans and robots like those robots do.
Human drivers kill ~40,000 people a year in the USA. The last thing we need to do is enable humans to drive even more aggressively. Soon it wont make any sense to allow humans to drive at all, just like we currently don't allow them to drive while impaired.
Instead go find the accidents per 100,000 miles driven. Then make sure it takes into account that the robots only drive in fair whether places like California and Phoenix.
I think you might actually be correct in your argument but the evidence you have brought for it is poor.
There is a future where a city's burrito taxis are replaced with drones rolling on the sidewalk or flying to the rooftops. And, the large majority of the remaining city drivers are replaced by robotaxis with multi-sensor 360 tracking. Where there are nearly zero parked cars. So, the parking spaces have been replaced with bike lanes of bikers and scooters with every robotaxi on the street planning around their motion.
Far less fuel consumption. Far less street crowding. Far fewer accidents.
And, of course everyone hates the idea.
We used to have books exploring scenarios like this. They were great books, a lot of time, but the most convincing ones didn't paint your future to be a very pretty, peaceful, or equitable one. You might want to read some, at least to understand why some people might be inclined to "hate this idea".
For what it's worth, the answer for this question for today is already probably fairly high for most large US cities, unfortunately
Cities will have lots of drone deliveries in them in the future. And it'll be more safe and economical than the current situation.
Anyone ever ask themselves why they have a knee-jerk impulse to support a billion dollar company's attempt at centralizing transportation?I'm sorry but safety and making your life easier isn't Silicon Valley's main concern.
So why can't we prefer robot vehicles on the basis of safety and convenience?
If you want to make it about centralization, needing to pay big money for a personal vehicle (most of which through centralized dealers), register it with the state and an insurance company, requiring a government license, paying for insurance/registration in perpetuity, having to park it in special parking zones -- that's as centralized and locked down as it gets.
It sounds like your real MO is that you think SV tech doesn’t care about safety or its customers… which is fine, I guess, but it’s muddying the point you were trying to make as your comment kind of devolved into a strange rant.
I also work from home so going and getting my food, in person, is a welcome respite from my office. But who’s turning a $15 McDonald’s order into a $30 thing, regularly?
I’ve tried it a few times but the food is always late, cold, and expensive.
Just the combo I wanted! I fire up my own tank and roll out now if needed.
I feel like you can't just leave a washing machine blocking the sidewalk unattended and sue anyone who scratches it while moving it? (IANAL)
If it's moving? You should just wait for it to go obstruct some other part of the sidewalk.
Was the Boston Tea Party childish vandalism or heroic patriotism? Only history gets to decide how the actions of disobedience are ultimately judged.
The availability, cost of acquisition, and engineering needed for support are much lower; the problem solving and communication are infinitely greater.
2) Remote control delivery carts are much safer and less intrusive than double parked delivery cars (sometimes unlicensed, untagged, and uninsured) or even delivery bikes (riding 20+ mph in the bike line or against traffic on 100+ pound "bikes").
The videos of those particular bots show them taking up a substantial portion of the width of a sidewalk (and definitely the full width in tight spots next to trees & fences) and moving and positioning themselves very clumsily and discourteously. They just sit in the middle occupying something like half the sidewalk width trying to decide what to do next, forcing people to walk to both sides in ~1/4 of the width. These things are not even close to ready for prime-time.
It is rude as a human to just stop in the middle of the sidewalk and unfold your map to figure out where you are going.
Programming in this kind of rudeness is just stupid, and will rightly generate backlash that will not be good for the companies. Of course safety is first, but it'd be more safe and courteous to have it hug one side of the walk. And if you cannot do that safely, not only are you not ready for prime-time, you aren't ready for public Alpha tests.
https://apnews.com/general-news-fc26378306a44d62bc9eb14b122f...
Brilliant. See Tom Scott's video about Vancouver's Rabbit Line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMTZvA8iFgI
Speaking of Vancouver and trains, the Broadway Subway Project is currently under construction, extending an existing line nearly 6 km for $3 billion.
https://www.broadwaysubway.ca/about/stations
In my hard sci-fi novel (beta readers wanted, see profile for contact), delivery bots play key roles in the plot. For local deliveries, a community of 1,000 people was constructed with no overhead cables, allowing food delivery by drop-drones.
Sounds like the robots don't do a good job at avoiding
The one I encountered a week ago, when I and another person got near it, it stopped moving. You have to go around them, and there's no way to get them out of the way if they're blocking something aside from leaving and hoping they start moving again.
Can’t go around it.
Have to go over it!
Probably not, but usual Uber style break rules use lawyers playbook