Chicago Delivery Robots Smash 2 CTA Bus Shelters

Two food delivery robots operated by competing companies have smashed into CTA bus shelters within days of each other, raising serious questions about the city’s ongoing pilot program allowing autonomous delivery vehicles on Chicago sidewalks.

The second collision happened around 4 p.m. Tuesday at North Avenue and Larrabee Street in Old Town, where a robot operated by Coco drove straight into the glass panel of a bus shelter and sent shards across the sidewalk. Video provided by a neighbor shows glass covering both the sidewalk and the top of the robot itself.

The incident follows a nearly identical crash just days earlier in West Town, where a robot operated by Serve Robotics plowed into a bus shelter at Grand Avenue and Racine Street. That collision was captured on video and spread widely across Reddit, X, and other platforms. By Tuesday afternoon, the West Town shelter had been repaired, though a few small pieces of glass still remained on the sidewalk.

Two robots. Two companies. Two bus shelters. Same mistake.

Coco called the Old Town collision a “rare, isolated incident” and said it launched an internal investigation. Carl Hansen, the company’s head of safety and government relations, pointed to the robot’s operating speed of roughly 5 miles per hour and said safety is a top priority in how the company designs and monitors its systems. He said Coco responded immediately, retrieved the robot, and reached out to the shelter’s owner to cover repair costs. “Across more than 1 million miles of deliveries, this is the first time one of our robots has collided with a structure like this,” Hansen said.

Serve Robotics offered a similarly measured response, saying it was reviewing the incident to “make improvements” and had been in contact with local stakeholders.

What neither company explained Tuesday was the central question: what caused their robots to crash into the shelters in the first place, and why did two separate autonomous systems operated by different companies make the same dangerous error in the same city within the same week.

That silence matters. Chicago’s pilot program for sidewalk delivery robots was already generating debate before glass started showing up on bus stop benches. Robots sharing sidewalk space with pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders is not a neutral proposition. The sidewalks of Old Town and West Town are not test tracks. They are public infrastructure, used by seniors, parents with strollers, people with disabilities, and the thousands of Chicagoans who rely on the CTA every single day.

A shattered bus shelter at rush hour is more than an inconvenience. Glass on a sidewalk is a hazard that does not discriminate. The fact that no one was injured in either incident reflects luck as much as anything else.

City officials have not yet responded publicly to the back-to-back collisions, and the terms of the pilot program have not been detailed in any statement from either company or the city. That opacity deserves scrutiny. When the city approves private companies to deploy technology on public sidewalks, residents deserve to know what safety standards apply, who is responsible when things go wrong, and what triggers a suspension of the program.

Coco’s acknowledgment that it is taking financial responsibility for repairs is a start, but it does not answer the operational question at the heart of this. These robots are supposed to be able to navigate urban environments. Bus shelters are fixed, stationary, and marked. If the obstacle detection systems on two different robots from two different companies failed to register the same type of structure, that is not a coincidence. That is a pattern.

Chicago has a history of letting technology companies use the city as a proving ground while residents absorb the risks. From scooter pilots to rideshare expansion, the pattern tends to run the same way: move fast, apologize when something breaks, and count on public patience to outlast the controversy.

Bus shelters protect riders from Chicago’s weather. Destroying them is not a minor hiccup in an otherwise smooth rollout. The city owes residents a clear accounting of what these robots are allowed to do, what happens when they fail, and whether this pilot program still deserves to continue.