It's regulation, but it's kind of forcing infrastructure and government to deal with a problem when maybe the model should be that these companies are forced to rent small areas of corners, parking lots, etc. for corrals and charging, kinda like the Fotomat drive-thru camera film development, or snow cone stands.
Seeing dead scooters laying in the streets here for days sucks, and while remarking the street makes sense in denser cities, it's a now semi-permanent eyesore too.
I would argue that the city should solve for this, because bikes and other small personal transport devices SHOULD have more designated secure parking. One person could park their car, or 15 people could park their scooters and bikes. In cities with good public transit, we shouldn't be allocating so much public space to people parking private vehicles.
Just require a tiny amount of rent, payable to the city, for correctly parked scooters. (This would be part of the scooter registration cost.) Then, if the scooter is left outside the approved sidewalk furniture zone, the company is issued a small fine (which is easy to enforce since the scooters must be registered and labeled with a barcode) that is designed to reflect the actual tiny cost of misplaced scooters (e.g., $5/day, not punitive) and incentivize the company to find a way to get their customers to leave scooters in the correct place at a reasonably high but not perfect rate.
Forcing each company to rent a million tiny places around the city from private parties is just highly inefficient. The transaction costs would be prohibitive.
I wasn't familiar with rental e-scooters before my latest visit to Ann Arbor, but now I am, because people leave them in the middle of the sidewalk. Fuck you if you're handicapped, I guess.
[0]: https://la.streetsblog.org/2018/11/08/santa-monica-installs-...