> discarded carelessly because parking them is evidently not the techbros' problem
You can't expect the scooter companies to spend 5-10 years partnering with the city and funding parking stations on every block before launching. This is historically how these things have to happen - thing comes out, has growing pains as it interacts with the public space, public space accommodates it. Cars came before traffic lights, bicycles came before bicycle lanes, electric power came before NYC's underground infrastructure, and I think it would be appropriate for cities to accommodate these kind of rental scooters and robot deliveries. People using these things will cause pressure for the city to accommodate faster than the infeasible top-down approach of having everything in place beforehand.
E-scooters aren't really as big a jump as those other things; they are just another way to travel on roads, not that conceptually different to bikes or cars. Traffic lights were pretty much an alien concept before cars became widespread, whereas sane parking is something we already have and expect of all other forms of transport.
Many big cities have bike rental schemes where you have stations dotted around the city so I'm not sure why we couldn't expect the scooter companies to do something similar. At the very least force them to internalise these costs by fining them heavily whenever their scooters cause a nuisance, so that their incentives are aligned. I don't agree that the only way to have technological progress is to let tech companies do whatever they like while society picks up the bill.
You can't expect the scooter companies to spend 5-10 years partnering with the city and funding parking stations on every block before launching. This is historically how these things have to happen - thing comes out, has growing pains as it interacts with the public space, public space accommodates it. Cars came before traffic lights, bicycles came before bicycle lanes, electric power came before NYC's underground infrastructure, and I think it would be appropriate for cities to accommodate these kind of rental scooters and robot deliveries. People using these things will cause pressure for the city to accommodate faster than the infeasible top-down approach of having everything in place beforehand.