While Chicago residents deal with the urgent threat of federal immigration agents rampaging through their neighborhoods, hundreds of unwanted side characters have managed to worm their way in seemingly overnight.
Over the past few months, swarms of delivery robots have taken over the city’s sidewalks, prompting locals to call for them to be shut them down. The delivery robots are part of a pilot program engineered by two companies: Coco, operating pink bots sporting obnoxious flag poles, and Serve, whose green and white bots sports two LED eyes.
As first reported by CBS, over 700 residents from 35 Chicago-area zip codes have signed a petition demanding that the city halt the rollout. Called Sidewalks are for People, the campaign demands city officials pause the pilots until they release data from studies on safety and accessibility, as well as the services’ impact on jobs.
“Are these things safe?” organizer Josh Robertson asked CBS. “Are our sidewalks safer with the robots than they were without? Are they more accessible with the robots than they were without?”
Some collisions have been reported already, including one in which a Coco-bot’s flagpole sent Chicago resident Anthony Jonas to the hospital. “I stumbled over it, and I whacked my eyelid against the visibility flag that’s attached to the robot… blood and urgent care, stitches. The whole thing,” he told CBS.
While some Chicagoans are focused on the civic road, others seem ready for vigilante action.
“I want to smash those things to pieces with hammers,” one resident raged in a Chicago subreddit.
“People in LA have started leaving their dog poop bags on top of them,” another commenter suggested.
Though several Chicago Aldermen have begun canvasing for residents’ opinions on the pilot programs, it remains to be seen if city officials will halt the rollout.
There’s also the question of how the robots will fare when the sidewalks are covered in Chicago’s notorious ice and snow. The pilot is set to run until at least May of 2026, and Windy City winters aren’t for the weak.
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