As autonomous delivery bots multiply from Chicago to Seoul, no national regulator has written the rulebook, so cities are improvising bans, permits, and speed caps one sidewalk at a time.
When the Glendale, California city council moved last year to pause sidewalk delivery robots pending new rules, it joined a fast-growing club of cities improvising their own response to a question no national government has answered: who gets to decide how a private autonomous machine shares a public sidewalk with the people who already use it? The answer, for now, is being written in pieces, in council chambers and transit authority offices from California to Seoul, and the resulting patchwork is what residents, operators, and disabled pedestrians are stuck living with.
The fight is no longer a single anecdote. In Chicago, resident John Roberts launched a petition calling for robots to be suspended citywide, citing reports of pedestrian collisions, robots striking people with their safety flags, erratic behavior blocking emergency vehicles at crosswalks, and pedestrians forced into the street to make way. The petition has roughly 4,400 signatures, according to the BBC. For blind neighbors, wheelchair users, and people with mobility aids, those collisions are not hypothetical: a robot that stops unexpectedly in the middle of a curb cut can cut a person off from a route they already fight to keep open.
Glendale's response is the closest thing so far to a model. Councillor Ardy Kassakhian has asked for regulation, insurance requirements, accessibility standards, permits, and operator accountability before any robot runs on a city sidewalk, the BBC reports, and the council is considering a temporary ban until those rules exist. That posture, robots only after a written framework, is a real policy choice rather than a freeze. It puts the burden of proof on the operator.
Other cities have landed on different tools. In the United Kingdom, Starship Technologies robots operating for Uber Eats have reportedly been vandalized in Sheffield. The company's European operations director, Danny Pass, told the BBC the robots are "friendly, polite, programmed to be careful" and have been running in UK communities since 2018, yet the company has not yet faced a written national standard covering speed caps, hours of operation, or geofencing. South Korea and Japan are described in industry summaries as liberal hosts for the technology, while the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom remain patchy: some cities ban, some permit, and many have not decided.
For labor, the question runs in parallel. Alex Marshall, president of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, told the BBC his union is tracking job-displacement risk for delivery drivers and is preparing to pressure the government, Transport for London, and local councils if the rollout becomes permanent nationwide. His concern is concentrated in precarious London work, where a sidewalk robot is not just a novelty but a substitute wage.
What is striking is the speed. A Transforma Insights report cited by the BBC projects roughly 2.1 million delivery robots in operation worldwide by 2034. That is not a fringe forecast, and it implies a market that will outrun any single city's moratorium. Without a national or supranational rule, the regulatory direction gets set by whichever council moves first, and by the operator's playbook.
The policy levers already in use elsewhere are not a mystery. Temporary bans buy time to draft rules. Permit systems can tie robot hours, speeds, and geofences to specific operators. Insurance and accessibility standards can be required before deployment. A few jurisdictions have begun publishing collision and near-miss logs, which gives blind pedestrians and wheelchair users a real channel to surface failures. None of this requires picking between robots and people. It requires writing the rules the operators did not bring with them.
Roberts' "out of the way" framing in the BBC piece turns out to be more literal than it sounds. The question is not whether pedestrians should step aside for a cooler future of delivery. The question is who gets to write the terms under which they are asked to, and whether those terms will be on paper before the next council meeting, or only after the next recorded collision.