Originally Posted by
tandempower
Scooters have the smallest parking footprint of any vehicle, including bicycles, and they have the lane footprint of a bicycle.
That is true, but you are ignoring several factors. First, the use of 'scooters' is weather-dependent. They are utterly useless in anything other than more or less perfect, temperate/mild conditions. No one in his/her right mind is going to use or depend upon 'scooters' in anything other than clement conditions, with the exception as always of a few outliers who will constitute a tiny percentage of potential users. So in North America, for example, they (scooters) are simply stupid anywhere outside the sun-belt (where, oddly enough, you live) as a 'serious' possible transportation mode.
Second, scooters and the users thereof are inevitably going to be competing for space with pedestrians, first and foremost, bicycles, and heavier vehicles (whether ICE or electric; driven or autonomous) on paved surfaces, on which 'scooters' are utterly dependent. Unlike bicycles, and unlike Shank's pony (one's legs), scooters are useless on anything other than perfectly smooth paved surfaces.
Third, the accelerating record of accidents/serious injury -- especially head injuries -- resulting from the use of these contraptions cannot be overlooked. You will no doubt come up with some specious conspiracy theory to explain these incidents away, but the simple fact is that persons using these stupid devices in dense urban environments are injuring themselves and others, at times severely.
Given that, the utility in real-world terms of these toys is at best severely limited: they require unobstructed paved surfaces and mild weather conditions. In other words, they are not the panacea you seem to think they are, and they in fact of their very nature work against your particular/peculiar vision of urban living.
Scooters -- whether 'kick' or "e" -- are toys; funny little contraptions that a few outliers might take a sort of misplaced pride in using, ostentatiously, to show off their facility/hardiness/defiance of convention and so on. In the longer term, they solve nothing in terms of the problems associated with overuse of motor vehicles etc. Their present proliferation in select cities in North America is the result of nothing more than the speculative ventures of a few start-ups using other people's money to attempt to profit short-term off of peoples' impulse to show off or to demonstrate some sort of 'awareness'.
No matter how one cuts it, these ventures are disgusting on every level given their complete disregard for user safety and of municipal authority.