Pink Coolers on Wheels Already Cross Downtown. The 350-Pound Ones Want the Bike Lane.

Coco’s pink-and-red boxes have been rolling through Downtown San Jose since April, pausing at lights like any other pedestrian and dropping coded meals at stoops within about two miles. Serve Robotics joined later. Together they already feed Uber Eats and DoorDash orders from spots such as Punjab Cafe on East Santa Clara Street and Sixth Street Burger. Bobby Saini at Punjab now loads butter chicken and garlic naan into a compartment several times a night. The city never signed a formal contract with either firm. Staff waved the fleets through under older policies about fewer car trips and lower emissions, then called the stretch a learning period.

Council will likely vote this fall on actual rules: permits, insurance, $200 to $250 a year per robot, and the right to cap fleets or yank a permit if machines block curb ramps, bus zones, or bike lanes. Until then, the only speed cap on the sidewalk is an informal 5 mph, a number reporters have had to jog to match. Coco units weigh about 100 pounds empty. Serve’s weigh 161. DoorDash wants to put 350-pound Dot robots, roughly a tenth the size of a car, into bike lanes at speeds that can reach 20 mph. City staff decided those machines were too slow for car lanes. Cyclists get the experiment instead.

Disability advocates have already named the obvious collision: a stalled cooler on a curb cut, a walker forced into the street. Sheri Burns, formerly of the Silicon Valley Independent Living Center, also called grocery-by-robot a possible game changer for people who cannot easily leave home, and she praised Coco’s BlindSquare mapping of cracked sidewalks. At La Victoria Taqueria, staff found one unit flipped on its back. Arturo Litvin watched his Sixth Street Burger order arrive by robot, then noticed Uber Eats refunded the tip. Human couriers still do the bulk of the work. The companies will not say how many of those shifts they expect to erase.

San Francisco locked robots down in 2017 before they spread. Fremont is letting DoorDash run Dots under an encroachment permit that expires in March, with a 16 mph cap and a $1 million insurance floor. San Jose chose the opposite sequence: sidewalks first, ordinance later. Coco’s government lead says a frozen bot on a sidewalk would be rare and short-lived, and field techs are supposed to arrive within 30 minutes. Guadalupe River Trail stays off limits. Willow Glen is already on Coco’s near-term map as the next expansion opportunity.

Source: The Mercury News