Vibe governing comes for your sidewalk
Vancouver council voted this week to put new sidewalk delivery robots into Kitsilano and downtown this fall. ABC councillor Peter Meiszner said the city had been “too slow” on ride-hailing and e-scooters, and he didn’t want to “make the same mistake again.” Sure, bro.
I read the actual motion from ABC councillor Mike Klassen. It’s long for a motion like this, three pages, but actually pretty empty. Seven WHEREAS clauses, six of them about Vancouver being a tech hub and Serve Robotics being an established U.S. leader. Three operative clauses: direct staff to develop the pilot with Serve, amend the Street Vending By-law to include autonomous sidewalk robots, and have the Mayor ask the Province to confirm the robots fall under “designated micro-utility devices” in Bill 23. That’s it. The word accessibility shows up once, in a preamble, and binds nothing.
It is worth saying plainly what Serve actually is. A NASDAQ-listed company headquartered in Redwood City, California, spun out of Postmates after Uber bought Postmates in 2020, currently operating in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The Vancouver connection is biographical: the CEO immigrated here at nineteen, and the company ran a two-week Pizza Hut trial at a single Vancouver location in 2022. That is the entirety of the local tie. If the pilot scales, the rents flow to a U.S. balance sheet. The externalities stay on Vancouver sidewalks.
This is part of a trend where governments at every level are, to quote Avi Lewis, “refusing to goddamn govern”. Elected officials like Meiszner and Klassen imagine their job is to accelerate technology adoption. Clear the runway for innovators. Don’t get left behind. Whichever arrogant U.S. firm shows up with a product to test on a Canadian street on Canadians, the answer must be YES, with a six-month pilot and a polite request that staff monitor. Regulating in the public interest, planning for collective benefit or community safety, asking who pays and who captures the gains: these all get filed under friction and obstruction, the kind a “very serious politician” learns to ignore.
OneCity’s Lucy Maloney made the case I wish more people in government would make during this frenzied moment. And you can see exactly what she was naming as problems once you read the motion. No required consultation with the City’s Persons with Disabilities Advisory Committee. No accessibility audit before deployment. No incident-reporting threshold. No labour-impact assessment for the entry-level couriers this displaces. No public consultation in Kitsilano or downtown. No environmental review behind the “green tech” framing and sustainability claims. The motion authorizes a private fleet and amends a by-law. The safeguards and planning are vibes only.
So, vibe coding has a sibling now: vibe governing. Ship the pilot, figure out the failure modes in production. But, illegible to the tech bros, the “failures” here have names and families. A toddler struck on the sidewalk. A blind person tripped. A wheelchair user blocked at a curb cut. A courier whose income evaporates. The people these failures land on didn’t agree to be the test and it’s not clear how they benefit yet.
A small, slow, electric robot rolling down a sidewalk is genuinely saner than a solo gig worker in a two-tonne SUV driving a donair for fifteen minutes. Three thousand times less kinetic energy to move a donair is a real benefit, and I want it. You should want it! Yet: a sidewalk robot designed around worker replacement and fastest-possible private profit is not the same machine as a sidewalk robot designed around kinetic safety, accessibility, fair work, and public ownership of the rents it generates. The hardware is identical. The political economy is where we need to take the entire fight.
Three thousand times less kinetic energy to move a donair is a real benefit, and I want it.