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.
Why are you assuming that a human would be more efficient and better for the environment than an electrically powered robot? It is very inefficient (approx 25%) to use food as an energy source, 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.
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.
Yeah, depending on the speed of these vehicles, it seems like bike lanes are the appropriate place for them. A smart city could even offer companies an opportunity to fund the buildout of additional bike lanes if there aren’t any existing in the neighborhood in question
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.
Wait, the first part I get: the robots are basically motor scooters, don't belong on sidewalks, sure. But the last bit, about "taking tasks that could be a job for someone" --- that's the lamplighter fallacy, isn't it?
As someone who has lived in chicago for 30 years I dont mind telling you that laws are not enforced here. Bikes and scooters not being legal on sidewalks has not stopped a single person from biking and scootering on the sidewalk
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
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 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 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
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.
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.
Well, if there are fewer drivers then there is room for them on the road isn’t there?
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.
>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. ?
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.
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?
The big appeal of humanoid robots to me is that they don't need to be automated; even if they were teleoperated there is a lot of new capability. Operators could rotate in and out more easily in shifts, they could operate where a human would be inappropriate (i.e. imagine a robot maid application where the robot could be activated 24/7, whereas something like a housecleaning service is only able to visit infrequently and during specific times. Or, with the delivery application the operator would be a lot safer than the robot navigating traffic and terrain.).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
There's no scenario where these delivery bots survive US city sidewalks. They will be hijacked, destroyed/attacked, vandalized heavily. The police will not be able to do anything about it. The business model will not survive the US, unless the companies plan to deploy delivery tanks. It'll thrive in safer cities around the world though.
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.
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.
The thing with those guys, as you have rightly pointed out is for all their problems they do get out of the way and filter through traffic (dangerously as you point out)
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.
If you're referring to Toronto, I couldn't agree more. Couple times a week I find myself confronting an ebike deliverer on the sidewalk and kick him off.
They are frustrating to be sure, especially the moped versions, but are imo still far better to be around then drivers. I'd much rather the bike lanes to be together and throttled ebikes moved to the road, but it wouldn't make near as much a difference as getting people to not run reds or put down their phones.
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.
> 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".
My point is that you aren't simply pushing robots off the sidewalk and getting a better city. You have externalized the problem somewhere else. "Look, our streets are free of garbage", he says, dumping it all into the ocean...
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).
>if you're going to argue that robots are objectively worse, I'm not so sure.
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.
>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.
“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.
What do you think the noise is like in your future city? How many cameras and microphones are constantly streaming everything they see and hear into some corporation's private cloud? How many advertisements do we see on our pleasant bike ride? What's it like when a blizzard or flood drives the environment far outside of training norms? Have the debris-collecting drones already been deployed to clean up e-waste when the built-to-be-abandoned delivery drones lose battery or guidance, or is that a V2 thing? Are the police equipped to track down to track down the hacker that overrode my delivery drone?
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".
There are thousands of vehicles moving around your house and neighbourhood already. The vast majority of them are large enough to kill you, and emit fumes that poison you and the atmosphere.
Cities will have lots of drone deliveries in them in the future. And it'll be more safe and economical than the current situation.
Recently there's been a lot of anger in San Francisco about a Waymo (which have an excellent safety record with humans) killing an outdoor cat who that walked under the car and sat in front of a tire, when not long after someone was killed by a person backing into a crosswalk and it was a barely a blip on the radar.
The person who killed the bystander has social/legal/financial ramifications. Google had zero.
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.
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.
These companies tried to start years ago in Berkeley but people wouldn't tolerate them and they always ended up flipped over in the road. Let it be known that I will not "dodge" something like this under any circumstances. Robots need to get out of the way and stay out of the way.
Readit News
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.
The extend to which some people get food delivered is absurd. I'm sure there exceptions and reasons and everything, but seriously.
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.
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. ?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.