The cars are parked in designated spots on the road, with all sorts of rules about how long and how much you have to pay for the spot. In Santa Monica, pretty much every available parking spot has a meter that means you have to pay to park there, and are limited in how long you can park there.
Now, we can have all sorts of public policy debates about how much of a city's public space should be dedicated to parking spots, but at least the public had a say in the policy and at least there IS a policy.
We just need rules around where you can park the scooters and for how long, and how much you have to pay to use the public space to park your scooter.
The actual basis of your complaint is that you like parking, but you don't like scooters being put wherever.
I think it is a bit unfair to say we have democratically decided to let scooters park everywhere simply by the fact that we haven't yet passed any laws about where they can park; the law is slow to move, and the scooter parking issue is pretty new. Before Bird and Lime, there were not enough scooters around to be a big enough problem where we needed a law. Now we do, but the law is slow to change.
In the mean time, it is pretty annoying.
This is disingenuous. It ignores all the externalities of car friendly cities that you're taking for granted. Busy streets are wider with more lanes, crosswalks are more inconvenient and take longer to cross. Half of the width of narrow streets is dominated by parking, not to mention all of the unsightly lots and parking garages.
Scooters don't cost millions/billions in real estate for parking. They can't use and don't require expensive freeway onramps. They don't cause massive congestion and the corresponding drop in local air quality. All in all I think if you want to compare externalities, scooters win by far over cars, and it's not even close.
