If people would stop leaving discharged scooters in the sidewalk, I might care less. As is, they're a nuisance building a business off of overusing a communal resource (sidewalks)

Reserving one parking space per block for scooters, bikes, and other small vehicles would benefit everyone and have little downside.

Other than people with cars complaining that there now isn't room for their one giant single-occupant vehicle compared to parking for 5-10 bikes and scooters.

Cities can solve this by enforcing geofencing to only allow locking the scooter in designated areas. Santa Monica for example paints scooter parking spots on a lot of street corners that would otherwise be pretty littered.

Southampton (UK) had a pilot scheme for Voi scooters and had geo-fencing in the app, for parking zones, speed restriction zones and no-go zones.

Theoretically a great thing, but at least one of the parking zones was slightly off, and the scooter would only lock in the middle of the road!

The worst offender for geofencing is honestly the city of beverly hills. Bird scooters don't work in their borders at all, but their borders aren't so clear when you are just riding the bird. Imagine going down a busy 6 lane road full of angry west LA drivers and your scooter just runs out of steam leaving you stranded in 50mph traffic that would rather see you laid out than make way for you. When I told the bird tech support I wanted my money back for them risking my life in this way, they informed me this was expected behavior.

Same issue in some other parts of town to a lesser extent, like on some parts of hollywood blvd. Gee, why is my scooter coming to a stop in the middle of a busy intersection? Oh, some local assholes must have complained to the city councilman and had this virtual bear trap installed in the middle of a busy road, lets hope I don't die trying to wheel this thing off.

Yeah that sounds downright dangerous.

In Southampton it was more like "you can only park here" or "you can't scoot in the public parks" or "this is a hospital zone so you're limited to half speed". That said, it was only a pilot, and I can see the exact same thing happening down the line.