It's practically an article of faith on here that these scooter companies are providing a valuable public service and deserve to succeed, but I have yet to see

It's practically an article of faith on here that these scooter companies are providing a valuable public service and deserve to succeed, but I have yet to see a single halfway decent argument for why that's the case. From where I'm sitting the whole thing seems like a bad joke. The people hoarding scooters are probably just waiting until the company inevitably folds, with the (likely correct) assumption that an already overstretched municipal police force isn't going to be bothered to help a (fiscally and ethically) bankrupt company track down hundreds or thousands of lost scooters across town. The correct response by cities to the issue of the startups dumping scooters on public sidewalks is to send them to the municipal recycling plant for scrapping.