There’s a very effective solution - predefined parking spaces, and after getting a scooter you can only park them in one of those predefined spaces. It works that way in a lot of european cities, and it works well. The problem is the ability to leave them anywhere, it was chaos before they implemented the predefined parking spaces where I live.

Mandated parking zones are very effective because you can’t really end the trip if you’re not on a parking zone, meaning that you keep getting charged until you park it in a parking zone.

Here you could leave the scooters anywhere for about a year, and it was nice because I could take one right to my doorstep - but my neighbours took them inside their house, and there were scooters everywhere taking up sidewalks. Around a year ago, it changed and now there are predefined parking spaces, around 50m or 100m from each other. I haven’t seen “abandoned” scooters outside of parking spaces for a few months now, and a lot of people still use then anyway.

Where I live, people in rental trucks go around at night gathering low battery scooters and unloading fully charged ones. Apparently you can make good money doing that work and recharging them.