Robots on the Sidewalk: What Chicago's Delivery Robot Pilot Means for Your Block
How this was made
Two robots smashed through Chicago bus shelter glass in the span of a single week this March. One was a Coco robot at North and Larrabee in Old Town. The other was a Serve Robotics unit in West Town. Both incidents shattered glass panels. Neither involved a human driver. That's sort of the point — and sort of the problem.
Chicago's personal delivery device (PDD) pilot program is now in full swing, with autonomous sidewalk robots from two competing companies rolling through neighborhoods across the city. If you live in Lakeview, Logan Square, Humboldt Park, or any of the other neighborhoods in Serve's delivery zone, there's a real chance one of these machines has already rolled past your door.
And if you're wondering how this happened without anyone asking you — you're not wrong to wonder. But here's the part that should bother you even more: nearly 18 months into active robot operations on Chicago's sidewalks, the city has not published a single data point about it.
How This Started — Without You
The Personal Delivery Device Pilot Program was introduced to City Council by the Lightfoot administration in July 2022 and passed in September 2022. That's a two-month window from introduction to approval, with no documented public hearings before the vote.
The city's own press release justified the program with explicitly industry-competitive framing: a "working group with City agencies and community partners" had evaluated the industry and concluded that the devices "would keep Chicago competitive in this emerging market alongside other large cities." The composition of that working group — who sat in the room, which companies were consulted, which community partners were actually represented — was never made public.
This pattern isn't unique to Chicago. A 2023 paper in the journal Urban Geography found that sidewalk robot regulation in California was "largely driven by the first-mover robot companies." Cities don't typically wake up one morning and decide they need delivery robots. The industry comes to them.
The ordinance placed the robots under an Emerging Business Permit — a framework designed for concepts that don't fit existing license categories, the same mechanism the city used for e-scooters. The permit is managed jointly by the Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection (BACP) and the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT). The program runs until May 2027, at which point City Council must affirmatively act to continue it — or it expires.
Two companies currently hold permits:
Coco Robotics — licensed in November 2024, deployed first
Serve Robotics — launched in Chicago on September 30, 2025
The City Didn't Spend Money — It Spent Your Sidewalk
Residents asking "what did the city get out of this?" deserve a straight answer: there is no record of any city financial investment in the program. The companies pay permit fees to operate; the city's contribution was regulatory access to public right-of-way — your sidewalk — granted to private, for-profit companies.
That's not a trivial thing to give away. Chicago's sidewalks are public infrastructure, built and maintained with public dollars, legally designated as the public way. Granting a commercial operator the right to run a fleet of wheeled machines on them is a land-use decision, even if it doesn't show up in a budget line.
What the city does spend is staff time. BACP and CDOT staff oversee the program and review monthly reports submitted by Coco and Serve. Neither agency has disclosed what that administrative burden costs taxpayers. When WBEZ requested an interview with BACP about the program in March 2026, the agency declined. The monthly reports from the companies — the primary source of safety and operational data for the entire pilot — have never been made public.
So the city accepted a business case from industry, approved it in two months, granted access to public infrastructure, and is now reviewing the results in private. Residents are being asked to share their sidewalks with a new commercial enterprise while the data justifying that decision remains behind closed doors.
30,000 Miles of Sidewalk, Zero Public Data Points
Here's a number worth sitting with: Coco and Serve together logged nearly 30,000 sidewalk miles in Chicago in 2025. That figure comes from the Chicago Tribune's March 2026 reporting, sourced from the companies themselves. It's the best operational data point publicly available about the program — and it came from a press release, not a city dataset.
The companies reported "a handful" of safety incidents to the city over that same period. What does "a handful" mean? We don't know. How many incidents per thousand miles? Unknown. What kinds of incidents — near-misses, collisions, property damage, injuries to pedestrians? Unknown. Which neighborhoods had the most incidents? Unknown. What were the circumstances of each one? Unknown.
None of this data exists on the City of Chicago Data Portal. We searched it. There is no PDD dataset, no robot incident log, no fleet size disclosure, no geographic deployment data. The city's open data portal — which publishes everything from sidewalk café permits to pothole repairs — has no record that autonomous delivery robots are operating on Chicago's sidewalks at all.
That's not a minor gap. That's a policy choice.
The Sidewalk Café Comparison You Need to See
The city's own open data portal lists 1,181 sidewalk café permits issued in 2025. Every one of them is public record: business name, address, ward, issue date, expiration date — all searchable, all downloadable, all available to any resident who wants to know who is using the public way near them.
A restaurant that wants to put four tables outside on the sidewalk has to apply for a permit from BACP. That permit is logged, located, and published. The city reviews it. The public can see it.
A company that wants to send a fleet of autonomous wheeled machines rolling down those same sidewalks — 30,000 miles worth — operates under an Emerging Business Permit whose contents, geographic scope, fleet size, and safety record are not published anywhere the public can find them.
This is the core absurdity of the program as it currently operates: the city demands more transparency from a restaurant putting chairs outside than from a tech company operating robots on the same block.
What Serve Robotics Actually Does
Serve Robotics (Nasdaq: SERV) is a company that spun out of Uber in 2021. It builds AI-powered, low-emission sidewalk delivery robots designed to operate at Level 4 autonomy — meaning they can navigate urban environments without real-time human control under defined conditions. The company claims a 99.8% delivery completion rate across its fleet.
The robots are hard to miss. Each one bears a name, sports camera eyes that give it a vaguely personable look, and rolls at a maximum speed of 5 mph — slowing down automatically when pedestrians are nearby. Serve's Chicago hub is located at 1612 W. Fulton in the West Loop.
When Serve launched in Chicago last September, its delivery area covered 14 neighborhoods:
Austin
Belmont Cragin
Dunning
East Garfield Park
Humboldt Park
Lakeview
Lincoln Park
Little Italy
Logan Square
Near North Side
Near West Side
Uptown
West Garfield Park
West Town
Chicago is Serve's first Midwest market and its first expansion outside of its home base in Los Angeles, where it also operates with Uber Eats.
The Industry's Argument — and Why It Doesn't Quite Hold
The companies make a real-sounding case. Serve's spokesperson told Axios: "Our robots help replace the 2-ton cars on the roads that currently handle about 90% of last-mile deliveries. By reducing the number of vehicles on the road, we make streets safer for pedestrians, children, and cyclists, while also cutting congestion and emissions."
It's worth unpacking that carefully, because it's doing a lot of work. "Replace" implies that delivery cars disappear when a robot takes a route. They don't. Delivery drivers are gig workers who pick up orders across multiple apps — if Serve handles a Uber Eats order on one block, that driver takes another order from DoorDash on the next. The cars don't go home. They find another trip.
The pitch also reframes a commercial expansion as a pedestrian safety benefit — arguing that the best thing for people walking Chicago's sidewalks is to add a new category of wheeled commercial traffic to them. For a city that has spent years investing in walkability and active transportation, that logic deserves scrutiny, not a two-month approval window.
And critically: no independent study verifies the car-displacement claim. The only evidence that robots are reducing vehicle traffic comes from the robot companies themselves, delivered in private monthly reports that the city has never released.
For some wards, the rollout has been quiet. Alderman Bill Conway of the 34th Ward, an early Coco testing ground, told Axios his team had received "only a handful of questions from residents" — mostly about sidewalk crowding. But quiet isn't the same as supported, and a handful of complaints isn't a public hearing.
The Pushback — and the Bus Shelters
In the 1st Ward, it's been anything but quiet.
Alderman Daniel La Spata surveyed his constituents and found that 83.7% of respondents strongly disagreed with expanding robot delivery into the ward. He moved to block any expansion beyond the small footprint already operating there. This month's two bus shelter incidents only hardened that position. "Two in seven days is not great," La Spata said after the second crash.
Beyond the crashes, disability advocates and pedestrian groups have raised concerns the city has not answered:
How do the robots interact with people using wheelchairs, canes, or guide dogs?
What happens on narrow or uneven sidewalks — a defining feature of many Chicago neighborhoods?
Who is liable when a robot causes property damage or injures someone?
What are the job impacts for human delivery workers?
The ADA dimension is particularly underexplored. A 2024 regional snapshot from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning found that only 14% of northeastern Illinois municipalities have the documented barrier-removal plans required under Title II of the ADA — and that's for fixed infrastructure. The question of how autonomous sidewalk robots interact with people who rely on that infrastructure for mobility hasn't been formally studied by the city or addressed in any public document.
A coalition of residents has circulated a petition calling on the city to pause the program until it releases safety data, holds a public hearing on job impacts, and writes clear rules ensuring sidewalks "remain people first." As of late March 2026, no public hearings have been held and no safety data has been published — nearly 18 months into active robot operations on Chicago streets.
The Missing Data Is the Story
It's worth being precise about what "no public data" actually means here, because the city might argue the data exists — it's just in those monthly company reports.
That argument doesn't hold. Public infrastructure requires public accountability. The sidewalk isn't a private platform that Coco and Serve built. It belongs to Chicago residents, maintained by their tax dollars, regulated under the public way. When a private company gets commercial access to it, the terms of that access — and the data about how it's being used — are public business.
Chicago publishes every sidewalk café permit on its open data portal. It publishes every CDOT right-of-way permit for construction, festivals, and street events. It publishes pothole repairs, tree trims, and rat complaints. The city clearly understands the principle that commercial use of public space warrants public disclosure.
The PDD pilot operates outside that framework — not because the data doesn't exist, but because the city chose not to publish it. No dataset. No incident map. No fleet count. No ward-level breakdown of where the robots operate. Nothing a resident could use to understand what's happening on their own block.
That's not bureaucratic oversight. That's a policy choice about who the program is accountable to. And right now, the answer is: the companies, not the public.
Where Things Stand — and What You Can Do
The pilot expires in May 2027 without City Council action. That's the lever. The same council that approved this program in two months with no public input will eventually have to vote on whether to make it permanent — and that vote is the moment residents have the most formal power to influence the outcome.
Ward-level pressure matters in the interim. La Spata's hold on 1st Ward expansion shows how aldermanic prerogative can work in residents' favor. If you live in one of the 14 neighborhoods where Serve currently operates, your alderman's position on expansion is worth knowing — and worth making known to them.
The questions worth demanding answers to before any permanent vote:
What do the monthly safety reports actually show? Make them public.
What was the business case presented to the city in 2022, and who presented it?
Has car traffic for food delivery actually decreased in any measurable way?
What are the accessibility incident rates for people with disabilities?
Why is there no PDD dataset on the city's open data portal?
When will the city publish ward-level deployment data so residents know where the robots operate?
If the city won't release the data voluntarily, residents have a right to request it. FOIA requests to both BACP and CDOT for the monthly safety reports, permit fee schedules, and working group membership from 2022 are a legitimate path to answers. The Illinois FOIA statute gives the city five business days to respond.
The sidewalk outside your building is public infrastructure. The city gave a private company access to it without asking you, and it's been keeping the results private for nearly 18 months. The least you're owed before 2027 is a straight answer about what they got in return — and the data to verify it.