Los Angeles has a new problem to navigate. While the city wrestles with self-driving Waymo vehicles packed with sensors, delivery robots are quietly multiplying across its neighborhoods, weaving between pedestrians and outdoor diners at an accelerating clip.
Serve Robotics, a major player in the autonomous delivery space, just deployed 500 additional robots across 40 neighborhoods this month, marking a dramatic jump from just two neighborhoods in 2023. Rival Coco Robotics, founded at UCLA in 2020, operates roughly 300 units around the city and is plotting further expansion. The machines move autonomously along sidewalks, ferrying salads, smoothies, and other food orders while navigating a landscape already hostile to pedestrians.
The influx has triggered backlash from Glendale, where officials are weighing a moratorium on the bots, and from Chicago, which has clamped down on their growth. The expansion raises a harder question: a city already notorious for poor walkability will soon face additional obstacles cluttering the very spaces where people move on foot.
Staff at Pazzo Gelato in Silver Lake describes the robots as minor nuisances that block foot traffic and disrupt the flow between outdoor seating areas. "They can block traffic," said Lula Ochoa, a barista and server there. "It gets congested in this area in between our tables. Kids will mess with them. They'll sit on them."
Down the street, workers at Millie's Cafe, operating since 1926, expressed stronger objections. "We hate them," one staff member said, requesting anonymity. "They're blocking the way and they're hitting people." Staff at Kreation Organic Juice Cafe raised concerns about both pedestrian interference and the loss of jobs for human delivery drivers.
Yet the machines inspire contradictory reactions. When a robot struggled through recent rainstorms, video of its determined journey went viral. People assign personalities to the machines almost involuntarily, especially when they display messages like "Push crosswalk button for me?" at intersections they cannot navigate alone. Even those frustrated by them admit to feeling a strange kinship with the little boxes on wheels.
At Seco wine bar, executive chef David Potes witnessed robots getting stuck in dense weekend crowds, only to receive cheers when they finally pushed through. "His friends," he reflected on the robots' plight, "both pity them and hate them."
Potes himself takes a pragmatic view. "It's change," he said. "The hardest thing for people to accept is change." He sees the robots as inconvenient but inevitable, a technological shift more visible than algorithms running on distant servers.
Bar patron Joe McDonough at 33 Taps framed the disruption as growing pains inherent to any new technology. He pointed to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, when an MP was killed during opening ceremonies. "Any new tech is going to have its bugs," McDonough said.
That said, the robots have compiled a troubling incident list. A cyclist in New Jersey reported being hit by an Avride robot and suffering a head injury and broken collarbone. Video circulated of a robot shattering a bus shelter window in Chicago. In 2024, a Waymo collided with a delivery robot in Los Angeles, though neither was damaged. An Avride representative defended the company's safety record, stating its fleet operates "in strict accordance with traffic laws and safety regulations."
Steven Gehrke, an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University, studied robot behavior on campus and found they often stop abruptly when pedestrians cross their paths, creating their own form of congestion. He recommends cities restrict robots from narrow or busy streets and designate dedicated parking zones for deliveries.
Researchers at Cornell University have developed a "robotability score" inspired by walkability ratings used in real estate. Matt Franchi, a doctoral student on the project, emphasizes that successful deployment depends on respecting existing pedestrian patterns. Dense commercial areas with leisurely shoppers, he suggests, may accommodate robots better than crowded streets like Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, where commuters rush past.
"The score is very community-centric in the sense that the existing environment needs to be respected, or else the score degrades," Franchi explained. Ironically, sprawling Los Angeles may be better suited to robot deployment than its more walkable counterparts.
Not everyone accepts the robots' expansion quietly. Near 33 Taps, a twentysomething woman named Petra demonstrated how to shut down a stationary robot by powering it off entirely. "LA is already one of the worst cities to be a pedestrian in the world," she said, "so we don't need things clogging the sidewalks." She questioned whether the machines deliver any social benefit. "I don't see it," she added. "What do they do? Like, sorry, just go to the restaurant. Pick up your food."
Meanwhile, the robots claim one environmental advantage: they produce no exhaust and add no traffic. Zach Rash, Coco's co-founder, noted that terrible weather drives food ordering demand but makes human driving less safe, a gap the bots could fill. Ali Kashani, CEO of Serve, told the Los Angeles Times the company tries to be engaged with communities even as skepticism mounts.
Author James Rodriguez: "LA's sidewalk war is just beginning, and the robots' adorable helplessness might be their best weapon against a city that desperately needs to rethink how it moves."
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