The economics of scooters really suffers from being dockless. I can see the appeal from a VC-funded startup perspective, because you can get a lot of them out

The economics of scooters really suffers from being dockless. I can see the appeal from a VC-funded startup perspective, because you can get a lot of them out there quickly without having to build any infrastructure, but the ongoing daily costs of charging them all (and replacing losses) makes them expensive to operate, hence the high cost. A dockless model would allow them to be much more affordable; in NYC, for example, you can do unlimited rides on docked rideshare for an annualized cost of under 50 cents per day. There's no reason in principle that a docked scooter system, with scooters charging from docks and prevented from theft while not in use, couldn't have costs come down to a roughly similar amount.