Becca Ostien was on her morning run along North Clark Street when she hit a wall of red. Not traffic. Not construction. A dozen Coco Robotics delivery bots, lights flashing, circling one another in a confused cluster that made the sidewalk effectively impassable.
She filmed it, posted it with the caption “Run route was crowded this morning,” and watched it rack up hundreds of thousands of views. Funny, until you think about who can’t just hop around a robot traffic jam. This is Chicago’s sidewalk robot pilot in sharp focus—nearly 28,000 deliveries and 29,000 sidewalk miles logged since late 2024, and now one very inconvenient viral video. This kind of autonomous-vehicle confusion isn’t unique to delivery bots—a driverless Tesla robotaxi recently made headlines for its own public-safety incident.
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