I don't actually understand your statement here - are scooter's public transportation? I thought they were owned by private companies. How is this board going to fuck up every kind of innovation in relation to public transportation.

Scooters dropped at random places are a massive problem for blind people and people with mobility disabilities.

The bike hire stations you see in some big cities (e.g. London) are a better solution; you get charged for it until you put it back in the rack. Dumping the bike somewhere just means your credit card will keep charging. It should be the same for the scooters. Mind you, this requires the city to work together with the scooter company, which implies that the city will be pulling one company forwards which may be considered unfair competition in the US.

The city could also pick up any scooters that are in the way / abandoned and fine the owner company for each of them, which would be a big incentive for the company to deal with it themselves.

Scooters need to be charged every night so juicers collect randomly abandoned scooters before the complete battery failure that would prevent company running the service to track its fleet. So charging for time up to infinity may solve the cost problem on the operator side, doesn't solve the societal problem of scooters left in random places. Where I live scooter users are charged extra if they don't deliver the scooter to a predefined location but that's not enough of a deterrent.

> Mind you, this requires the city to work together with the scooter company

And some cities would be happy to. Problem is, scooter companies don't want to work together with cities! They just show up and open shop, Uber style...

> The city could also pick up any scooters that are in the way / abandoned and fine the owner company for each of them

...and then cry foul when that happens, because why, this is destroying innovation and assaulting honest businessmen.

> Are the scooters even a problem?

Yes.

They're littering the streets. Beyond being just annoying, it creates a life-threatening hazard for the blind people. On top of that, they're used - as intended to be used - on the sidewalks, instead of the streets where they belong. This already killed many people around the world.

One idiot on a Bird copycat almost killed my then-9-months-pregnant wife, as he carelessly rode the sidewalk at high speed and didn't see passengers exiting the bus.

Cities have various policies towards innovation; some entangle everyone in red tape, others wave new ideas through. But the common thread of the famous SV startups in city space, and their copycats around the world, is building a business that dumps a lot of externalities on society, treating city councils as enemies, and then being surprised when said councils don't cooperate. If they want more friendly regulators, then perhaps they should be respectful towards said regulators (and people they represent).