LAKEVIEW — The robot revolution is here — on North Side sidewalks, at least.
With names like Stacey, Quincy and Rajesh, the boxy food delivery robots are regularly zooming down side streets — and occasionally getting stuck in the snow — to deliver Shake Shack or Taco Bell to eager patrons in Lakeview, Lincoln Park and Uptown, among other neighborhoods. They’re adorable to some, a safety hazard to others and impossible to ignore for most.
The buzzing bots are causing a stir in person and online. In neighborhood Facebook groups, they’ve found fervent support and fierce opposition, while a passionate contingent of neighbors have banded together to oust them from the city altogether.
Josh Robertson is leading that charge. The Lincoln Park resident has launched a petition calling for the city to hit pause on the robots, arguing, “Chicago sidewalks are for people, not delivery robots.”
The petition asks the city’s transportation and business departments to “release safety & ADA findings, evaluate that data and local job impacts in a public hearing, and set clear rules” for the robots. As of Dec. 2, more than 1,500 people have signed the petition, 350 of whom included an “incident report” describing their interactions with the robots.
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Robertson said he first noticed the robots in his neighborhood earlier this year and thought they were “kind of neat … . It felt futuristic.”
That changed when he went for a walk with his young children and a robot approached on the sidewalk, he said.
“This is a vehicle in the pedestrian path space that’s meant for people, and yet we ended up stepping aside, and something about that felt a little off,” Robertson said. “I began to wonder, what are our sidewalks going to be like if these programs are successful from the company’s point of view, and they continue to scale, and there are dozens and dozens of them on our sidewalks, even on quiet residential sidewalks?”
People walk around a Serve Delivery Robot as it rides along Damen Avenue in Bucktown on Dec. 6, 2025. Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago
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