I was actually in Santa Monica / Venice area for the first time a few weeks ago. I was /floored/ with how many scooters there were. I live in Atlanta and find them to be super awesome and unintrusive, but I could understand how the sheer quantity could put you off of them.
At least realize that they aren't so ridiculously overpopulated in other places -- it's probably the tourists that make it financially worth it to put out a deluge of them.
New things bring a particular reaction in some people. The streets around me are lined densely with parked cars. They take up a lot of space, impair visibility, etc but people look past them. Add a shared bike on the corner of one block and because it is new/novel some think it's a messy outrage.
(I drive and use street parking. There are no scooters here, but I'd love to have them as part of the city's ecosystem in the future.)
I was in Atlanta last month, and outside of Midtown (Tech/GSU), I didn't see them anywhere else. Here, we have them in SM/Venice, in Westwood, in Culver City, in DTLA, etc.
They're all over Atlanta. Midtown probably has the highest density of them but they're all over downtown, west midtown, Old 4th ward, Decatur, Reynoldstown, Cabbagetown, etc.
Go down Memorial or DeKalb heading east in the morning and you'll see rows and rows of them freshly set out ready to be kicked over like dominos by some jerk.
