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Valid points by those concerned with taking over the sidewalks.

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.

Imagine how much better for the environment it'd be if your delivery was brought to you via a human-powered bicycle. Or as an in-between: e-bikes and e-mopeds.

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.

Atlanta has been an early market for both scooters and various food delivery robots. Both have been a boon for the city.

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.

All the more reason to build separate infrastructure for bicycles and other “in-between” vehicles.
Bikes and scooters aren’t legal on sidewalks in Chicago, and these little robots are just clogging up what little pedestrian space still exists. Totally apart from the questionable ethics of gratuitously using tech for tasks that could be a job for someone.
The economies of scale of a 2,000 lb (electric) vehicle are probably such that they use far less carbon than an individual delivery robot on a per-delivery basis
Imagine if the people ordering delivery actually moved their body and went and got the food.
I live in a Chicago neighborhood where these are in use. They have very bright lights, actually blinding you as you approach one at night. They move much faster than is appropriate on a sidewalk. They position themselves in the middle of the sidewalk as opposed to the right hand side, impacting traffic in both directions. They round corners at intersections at below-eye-level, I’ve walked into more than one when they appeared in front of me at a corner. They park in the walkway while waiting for customers to retrieve their food. The hey are implemented in a way that demands everyone else gets out of their way. They have not attempted to integrate into the community, they have inserted themselves and we are to figure it out.

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 this exact same experience in ravenswood this weekend. I was walking to breakfast and one of these bots was blocking the entirety of the shoveled part of the sidewalk. I had to make may way into the snow to inch around the bot just so I could continue to use the sidewalk.

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.

I agree they definitely create a ton of new problems that we will need to figure out, but I think I am simply much much more sympathetic to the fewer drivers argument to the point that I feel like it is still worth doing and figuring out how to fix the details.
>stuck in the snow in the only walkable portion of the sidewalk

"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. ?

> they have inserted themselves and we are to figure it out.

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've seen a few in Lakeview but my experience hasn't been entirely the same as yours. I haven't noticed blinding lights at night. They seem to move relatively slowly and cautiously.

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.

> I offered no aid.

My teens call them “clankers” and are by no means fans of them. I’m surprised those things aren’t constantly stolen or vandalized.

The robots take 3 hours to get there too. Idk why anyone would want this for food at least
How far out are we from bi-pedal delivery robots? It wouldn't need to have AGI, just enough senses to keep from falling over, avoiding pedestrians and traversing minor obstacles. Or maybe a quadruped Boston Dyanmics robot?
waves from Ogden and Chicago

hate those things. I'm ready to start kicking them out the way

Thank you for sharing.

How do other people you know feel about them?

Do you see them get vandalized or messed with?

I don’t know how they’re legal when riding a bicycle on the sidewalk isn’t.
> the sidewalk is in the front yard, stupid.

> 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.

These are solved problems in other cities

All anyone has to do is look across the land

This honestly would be solved quite quickly when the cost of vandalism starts eating into their margins. Once they piss enough people off it becomes self-correcting.
Toronto outright banned a startup I was helping out with in 2021, they ended up packing up and moving it to Miami- Toronto has a rule that the city should not be made more inaccessible to folks with disabilities, and that a delivery robot could potentially cause an accessibility issue on the sidewalk for blind or wheelchair using folks. They didn't reach out to the startup, or tell them about the vote happening at council, they did invite the accessibility advocacy groups in. I agree the startup should have been banned (against my own interests) pending a review, however, I also believe a review of the technology and startup would have left very little room for concern. That said, I'm still skeptical robots on sidewalks are a great idea, ideally they can operate on the roadways.

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...

These robots would be a significant improvement over the current electric bike and scooter riders who not only drive recklessly on the roads but also take over the sidewalks. The situation has become lawless in the city, with many delivery drivers disregarding traffic rules entirely, they are a menace to pedestrians and vehicle drivers. I would like the city council to outlaw fast food delivery entirely, accept for the disabled. Young people need to get out more and should pick up their own falafel.
In fairness cities are not legally required to sent notices so they won't. They do not really want you to know and fight against the changes. This was a failure of your business leaders. They needed to be more involved following city hall lobbying for their business. Losing a license to operate is a bigger deal then whatever priorities were focused on.
Did the startup reach out to the city before deploying the robots?
> They didn't reach out to the startup, or tell them about the vote happening at council

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.

You only have to glance at the photos to see that the thing that has "taken over" is parked cars. The allocation of space is moving cars, parked cars, trees, poles, signs, lights, and then the sidewalk. It is not a fact of geology that the sidewalk is that narrow.
> “Chicago sidewalks are for people, not delivery robots.”

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.

As a pedestrian I find cyclist are worse than cars for obstructing my path. Riding on the footpath (illegal here) even with bike lane available right next to it, not respectig the traffic lights (mowing through pedestrians on crossings or blocking pedestrian crossings when stopped on red light), parking by blocking the footpath (must leave 1.5m of footpath unobstructed), riding the wrong way through traffic, flying down bike lanes (40kmh limit) and raging when anyone infringes their "rights" when they respect noone. In my experience, I estimate that 20% of car drivers are a-holes, 50% or truck drivers and 80% of cyclists.
Your overall point is certainly valid, but there's no "dichotomy" there. I'd say "sidewalks are for people, not X" where X is pretty much anything that's not people (including scooters and bikes, even though there are people on them).

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".

Where the technology currently stands, people are far faster, more agile, and more compliant with the rules of sidewalk and street use than this category of robots is. They're currently objectively worse; a human being on two legs can make much better use of sidewalk real-estate than a robot (and that's before noting that most delivery couriers are in the street, using a bicycle, scooter, or car).
“About half of all food deliveries globally are shorter than 2 and a half miles, which basically means that all of our cities are filled with burrito taxis”

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.

These are a disability nightmare for folks in wheelchairs and scooters and even canes. They take up 75% of the sidewalk in normal sidewalk widths, let along narrower ones. In the snow, if sidewalks aren't shoveled well, this is even worse, as the traversable area is even narrower. Even being able-bodied it's more annoying than its worth to have to dodge these things.
I had one of these delivery robots run over my foot in Chicago. I was not impressed.
I’ve lived in coastal tech cities but I’ve never done DoorDash, or Uber eats, or anything by robots. Obviously I’m not the norm with these behaviors but I also don’t understand market demand when I see so many DoorDash vehicles at McDonalds, while the news also talks about how McDonald’s is suffering because they lost the poor income demographic.

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?

Is it a felony if I kick that thing off the sidewalk ?
Are actual delivery people that expensive or that much more expensive than robots? I assume they make minimum wage.

The availability, cost of acquisition, and engineering needed for support are much lower; the problem solving and communication are infinitely greater.

People were kicked off the roads when automobiles came into prominence and laws against jaywalking were lobbied for by corporations. It would be a shame for that to happen again with sidewalks.
These save me about $10-$15 on tips regularly. Thankful for Coco.
1) "Take over" is slanted language. More accurately "Some residents complain about delivery robots on sidewalks"

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").

Delivery robots may not work out well in Philadelphia.

https://apnews.com/general-news-fc26378306a44d62bc9eb14b122f...

In another timeline, there are pneumatic tubes or underground trains routing to each building, negating the need for last mile delivery for most packages in dense urban areas. Adding these tunnels is probably too expensive now that the buildings are in place though.
At what point do we switch over to a network of vacuum tubes to every house to deliver food through.
I'm going long net manufacturers. Good strong nets will stop these things dead in their tracks.
I feel like part of this is people not being comfortable with the idea that they don't have to be deferent to the robots (i.e. do what you want, it will avoid you). That's perfectly understandable (nobody wants to walk in front a moving industrial robots), but is something these companies will have to work on if they want people comfortable around their bots.
One good thing about the robots is you can always scrap them for metal
Bikes aren't allowed on sidewalks but robots with wheels are?

Probably not, but usual Uber style break rules use lawyers playbook