I don't see how what you described has anything to do with Bird. It could be any scooter, or any random object that's falling out of a pick up truck. Running over things in general is going to be bad for your vehicle.
Nobody would leave their own scooter in the street, but people have no problem leaving someone else's scooter wherever it was convenient. People leave them all over the place where I live, and it's been a huge problem. They're constantly being fished out of the rivers, dumpsters, etc.
The issue is not precisely with Bird, but that the big dogs who fund these companies can produce giant pieces of wasted material thanks to how US and Chinese monetary policy works
You wouldn't blame the automaker for a drinking and driving incident that resulted in a death, you'd blame the driver.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=19Bl1ZhMvxbLliIyNkNe_Aj3QWD...
I contacted Bird and while they did look at the video and seemed sympathetic, I got the impression that nothing was done in response. That's because they refused to tell me even simple things like "The rider was reprimanded". I didn't ask for the rider's identity, just for what was done in response. And I contacted them within an hour of the incident, providing precise time, location, and the video above, so I'm very confident they knew who the rider was.
(Sorry for the strong language in the video. Note that I included some time before the incident because I know from experience that some people always seem to suggest that if a cyclist had a bad time on the road it was because they antagonized who gave them a bad time. I hope it's clear that I had no contact with this guy before the video.)
Fortunately, I don't see this as much with non-delivery cyclists. In NYC at least, this is mostly a problem with delivery people; the extreme pressure they are under to deliver on time, combined with the fact that many of them have clearly received no safety training, seems to be a major cause.
NYC's bad cyclists (and, in the future, bad scooterists) are actually scarier to me than NYC drivers because they can come at you from so many more angles thanks to their small size; it's much easier to predict and avoid cars and even pedestrians. (People are also used to cyclists here, so the cars are paradoxically not nearly as scary to me as they are in less dense environments.)
[edited to clarify that I was also on a bike]
The small size was a major problem here. I probably would have seen the scooter rider earlier if they were a driver running the red light. I now always check for red light runners at that intersection.
(As for how visible I was, I was wearing a hi-viz jacket at the time. My air horn seems to have been the only thing that caught the scooter guy's attention. Not sure what more I could do.)
1. Bird rider runs a red light. 2. Bird rider has head phones on. 3. Bird rider doesn't bother to look at oncoming traffic before crossing.
It's clear to me from this thread, that scooter riders need insurance and a driver's license. That would solve 90% of the issues right there.
Its doubtful the truck driver was an employee of bird, but its also likely they were only moving the scooters because of this model. That sounds like enough of a reason to add them to the suit that will also likely hit the driver.
Imagine running over a piano that fell off a truck, and then suing Steiner instead of the moving company.
On top of that, because many of the chargers are “contractors”, you get situations like the OP described where random people just throw scooters in their pickup, unsecured, and then they fly away on the highway.