Two Thousand Delivery Robots on the Sidewalk: Who Gets to Pass?

On September 13, 2025, on a West Hollywood sidewalk, Mark Chaney was heading home on a mobility scooter. Ahead of him, a small six-wheeled machine, a motorized cooler the size of a dog, refused to move aside. It braked, started again, cut him off to the right, then to the left. Chaney, who has cerebral palsy, filmed the scene: the video would pass twenty million views. The robot, for its part, was delivering a meal.

These machines now number in the thousands on American sidewalks. They promise something simple and appealing: receive a dinner or a bag of groceries without leaving the couch, no tip to calculate, no courier to meet downstairs. The benefit is real. The question is what ground it is built on.

The dinner that comes to you

The idea fits in one image: order on an app, then watch a rolling box arrive twenty minutes later, stop at your door and open to a code sent to your phone. No elevator to hold, no lobby to walk down, no handoff to manage. For anyone working from home, minding a child or unable to go out, the errand happens without interrupting anything.

The machinery is more finished than it looks. Serve Robotics, the leading player in the United States, claims "Level 4" autonomy: its robots cross intersections and crosswalks on their own, without an operator behind each trip, with a 99.8% delivery completion rate. They roll for Uber Eats and DoorDash, two of the country's largest delivery platforms.

The case is also economic. The last mile, that final stretch between warehouse and door, is the most expensive part of any delivery. An electric cooler moving at walking pace costs less than a scooter and its rider. That math, as much as customer comfort, is what drives the fleets to grow.

A fleet counted in thousands

In December 2025, Serve passed two thousand deployed robots, the largest sidewalk delivery fleet in the United States, after multiplying its fleet twentyfold in a year. The company operates in some twenty cities, from Los Angeles to Chicago, Miami to Dallas, and is guiding toward twenty-six million dollars in revenue for 2026.

It is not alone. Estonian pioneer Starship Technologies fields about two thousand seven hundred machines across more than one hundred fifty locations and six countries, with over nine million autonomous deliveries logged. After years on university campuses, it is turning toward supermarkets and urban food delivery. California's Coco runs a thousand robots from Los Angeles to Helsinki.

This is no longer a pilot. Three companies together approach six thousand machines, and each is raising tens of millions of dollars to move faster. The sidewalk, until now reserved for bodies, is taking on a commercial traffic that did not exist.

The sidewalk as commons

This is where the promise gets complicated. A delivery robot does not simply travel from A to B: along the way it occupies a space no one sold it. The sidewalk is not a private road. It is the last place people still move freely, on foot, with a stroller, in a wheelchair, with no license or toll.

Chaney's run-in was not a one-off. He describes regularly having to stop, detour or pull aside to let these machines pass, and at times having to step into the street on his crutches to avoid one on a narrow path. His charge is precise: a robot that has not been tested against a wheelchair, a scooter or a walker is not designed for everyone.

For an able-bodied pedestrian, stepping around a motorized cooler is only an annoyance. For someone in a wheelchair, on an already too-narrow lane, it is one more obstacle in a route that holds plenty already. The same autonomy that frees the customer at home takes its cut from the autonomy of the person walking.

Who pays for the clutter

The bill, then, is settled somewhere other than on the dinner receipt. The last-mile cost the robot lowers for the platform does not vanish: it shifts onto public space, and first onto its most fragile users. No one signed up for this, and no one collects rent for the sidewalk given up.

Cities are starting to feel it. In Chicago, more than eight hundred residents signed a petition to pause the delivery-robot program. Elsewhere the debate turns on speeds, widths, hours, the right to circulate. Serve, for its part, says it is fast-tracking an accessibility council to gather input from disability advocates, though what will come of it is still unclear.

Behind these trade-offs lies a question of diffuse ownership: who does the sidewalk belong to? As long as it was free and slow, the answer carried no stakes. The moment a private fleet runs a profitable activity across it, it quietly takes it over.

The delivery robot solves a real problem, the comfort of receiving without going out, and creates a quieter one: square foot by square foot, it privatizes a space everyone assumed was settled. You gain the dinner delivered effortlessly; you lose a little of the ease of a sidewalk that belonged to all. Nothing forces a choice between the two, provided someone decides who goes first when the path narrows. For now, the machine decides, and it is the man on crutches who steps into the street.