> It's the fact that the riders of these "e-scooters" almost always ride on the sidewalks / footpaths and cause safety hazard to pedestrians.
It's more dangerous to ride them on streets, even on bike paths. Who cares if it's illegal? I'd rather ride on the sidewalk then get hit by a car trying to pass me at 45 mph.
The pedestrians that are endangered by relatively high speed motorized vehicles riding on sidewalks care. It's totally reasonable for you to not want to ride a scooter on the street, but that doesn't entitle you to break the law and make sidewalks less safe for others.
I really haven't seen scooter riding on the sidewalk as a problem out in my area. People already ride bikes and skateboards and everything else, plus, a lot of sidewalks are under utilized with very few pedestrians as it is.
The democratic law of the land. I don't like it any more than you do - I'm all for increased penalties when drivers kill people, and/or banning cars from city-center streets - but society functions when people follow the democratic process to change laws they disagree with rather than just breaking them.
At least for bikes, it's fairly well accepted that riding on the sidewalk is less safe than riding on the road: http://bicyclesafe.com/#crosswalk
The chance of getting hit from behind likely decreases on the sidewalk, but the chance of getting hit from turning vehicles increases greatly. The chance of being hit by turning vehicles is higher in general as far as I remember, too.
