A lot of sidewalks in major cities don’t have room for these. Especially if you account for traffic, light, and power poles, street signs, bus and trolley stops, subway and El entrances, sidewalk trees, garbage, trash and recycling bins, sidewalk grates, cellar entries, cracked sidewalks, etc, etc, etc. And suddenly you’re being asked to give up one piece of space that’s supposedly reserved for you, to yet another ‘move fast, break things, get permission later’ techbro “innovation” that no one’s asked for.

There’s no regulation over them, no standards that they have to follow or how to behave, no way for the public to specifically identify a robot when they encounter it in public (like, say, your robot ran into my car or whatever).

I’d only allow them if each robot carried a certain amount of insurance, was registered and had some kind of license plate, had turn signals (I don’t know if they do, the ones I saw didn’t), had limited operating hours and locations, were forced to move aside for humans, etc - basically make them the absolute lowest priority thing on the streets and sidewalks. Streets, bike lanes, sidewalks, subways, etc, were each built for specific forms of human movement. If techbros want to introduce a new type of system, they should be forced to build their own infrastructure to support it (no idea what that looks like for delivery robots), instead of just blatantly overloading already-stressed public infrastructure.