> Before jaywalking was a thing, newspapers blamed drivers for accidents, assuming people had the right to walk anywhere (as they always had) and cars needed to yield.

This is not the full story, even before cars came into common use, society had to figure out how to manage pedestrians coexisting with horses and carriages on public roadways.

Eg. Check out the UK's Highway Act 1835 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Act_1835). It criminalized riding or driving a carriage on the footway (sidewalk) and made both pedestrians and drivers responsible for using due care to avoid collisions in the road.

This was a long-term societal shift to having dedicated infrastructure for both pedestrians and vehicles to avoid collisions, not some sort of sinister auto industry scheme.

Is your position that the outcome is strictly a result of the marketing campaign?

As car ownership increased, it seems possible that norms would change a bit.

> Before jaywalking was a thing

... jay driving was a thing first.

I would suspect safety had more to do with it than anything else. The closest I've ever personally come to hitting someone was because they jaywalked directly in front of my car, after walking between two parked vans so they were not visible until they strode right out in front of me. It was a near thing, but my reaction time is good and I am pretty attentive to what is in front of me. But physics is a harsh mistress, it is a dumb game to play.

We're not going to get rid of cars, much as some people think that would be a net improvement, so the sensible thing to do is make pedestrian crossings plentiful, obvious, and respected by both drivers and walkers. Public space is shared.

When people protest by bringing out the guillotine it is of course too violent and unbridled. When they block bridges then there are ambulances people might die in. When they pour paint on art it destroys priceless works. Now, when someone delays the Uber robot, it causes someone to get their lunch cold. One wonders if effective protest can only be done by sitting quietly at home, so as not to harm anyone or anything.

The first step to improving something is to show there’s a problem in the first place. For those who believe sidewalks are for people, she has demonstrated that there is a problem.

While I agree on the surface this seems pretty annoying in general. But deeper, she was able to accomplish 10000000x more than just posting an angry post on the internet about these bots. Unfortunately however, sometimes people are just seeking attention. We'll have to see where it goes.

so she should ... post on HN about it instead?

that's how you get people's attention to something, bring about public discourse, which can lead to political action

The big picture here is that government thugs dragging a person away is now the default response to essentially any type of social disruption, pretty much everywhere in the world.

This would have been unthinkable 200 years ago, during a time we are trained to think of as much more barbaric than the present.

Sometimes one can feel like your only action is a little one.

I assumed this was an astroturf comment because of how impressively reductive it is, but no, this person has been around for a while.

The police do not have unlimited power to order us around.

Quote from a lawyer in the article:

> Personal delivery devices must yield to other pedestrians and pedalcyclists in a pedestrian area

Sounds like the robot legally had to yield to her. If so, what lawful basis would the officer have had to make the order?

Is it a lawful order to command a person who is not committing a crime to move from a public sidewalk she has every right to be on?

Many useful things could kill jobs, yes. That's not a meaningful argument in itself.

I just don't understand how some people think. THey seem to think in terms of positive rights, ie any new type of action is something that you ask permission for. I never heard this anywhere, at least most legal systems are based on the negative view being the default. These same people would then whine their drone hobby got banned or they are not allowed to fix their car in their backyard.

> Either we let the sidewalk become a free for all or we don’t

Why? You already demonstrated that we are able to acknowledge scooters and wheelchairs. That shows that exceptions can be made. They were made on some basis that is not all or nothing. Likewise we can review the basis here and decide that robots are not allowed or we can decide that robots are allowed.

It’s a collective space and how we collectively allocate it is useful to consider. I’d happily take wider sidewalks if it meant admitting robots for instance.

There’s no reason to believe this is a walk-or-nothing situation. In SF, for instance, children do not need the sidewalk to travel on their bikes but they are permitted to use it.

“generally”? I live in an area of the USA where AFAIK bicycles are officially dual-mode and allowed to be on both roads and sidewalks, and have been on both sides of pedestrian/bicycle encounters on sidewalks in the past, without any major issue.

From the article it sounds like the Pennsylvania legislature has already considered the case of delivery robots specifically and decided that they should go on the sidewalk, though to what degree that reflects the popular will is unknown to me.

> but we generally don’t accept someone on a bicycle or someone skating

I see people on rented scooters/bikes on the sidewalk all the time. Society at large seems to absolutely accept this. (note that I'm commenting on the current state of affairs, not what I think ought be the case)

> robots on wheels.

Robots owners got big bucks which means power. They need ROI, not sidewalks (also, guess do they use sidewalks or cars?).

Yes. But when you act in protest, the goal is usually to gain attention.

Now the story is that the police came and protected an innocent robot by chaining up an old woman. That sure makes them seem like misanthropes.

Agree it results in lots of wasted human hours, not to mention the amount of death and pollution delivery vehicles cause.

I'd like to extend this quote from Stephen Jay Gould:

>I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops [and driving cars to deliver burritos]

I see this argument a lot, and it’s not wrong, but it omits the fact that in the USA we tie a lot of meaning and worth to what people do for a living. It’s going to be hard to get people to buy in to having their jobs automated if they see no path to finding some other source of meaningful employment. This will remain true until such a time that we don’t tie somebody’s societal worth to their ability to be productive.

(This also ignores all the fun things about work culture in the USA, like healthcare being tied to your job.)

That's how luddism works, you attack symbols that you can reach, when the root cause is unreachable or even unknown to you.

Were that the goal of the companies pushing this automation, you'd be 100% right, but they're not going to shift to UBI so you can do art instead of delivering food, they're going to just hoover up as much money from a market as they can and leave people destitute.

I don't think it's that awful that there be honest labor. There is a great deal of creativity that is not possible without self-sufficiency: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-blue-collar-jobs-of-phil...

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Should count legally as cars, if someone tries to follow it and block it, the operator could file a harassment or other suitable case.

90% of road space is given the cars. Where was the vote to put cars on the roads?

What about the recipient of the food, where do they factor in?

What a marvellously ironic name for someone dealing with a recalcitrant robot.

Here I am, brain the size of a planet and I have to move for a delivery drone. And I have this awful pain in the diodes down my right side. Life? Don't tell me about life.

Too bad we’re living in times where people’s patience is as shallow as their pockets.