Would it be okay if they were required to drive in bike lanes? I think public safety concerns such as the ones you raised are very important, but I feel slightly baffled at what I perceive as an almost curmudgeonly, visceral dislike for them :(
You can rarely hear them coming (I don't wear headphones or anything), and they'll zip by with enough speed to cause serious harm.
What if I had stepped to the side? Or done a stretch and moved my arm to the side?
I'm not trying to be in physical therapy for a year or more because you can't walk your bike from the nearest corner to wherever you intend to park it.
So she was facing a liability for fixing the car, perhaps some sort of insurance fraud on his part, AND her insurance was going to list an incidence of her "striking a pedestrian." Fortunately she found out there was some CCTV footage that exonerated her, but all of that just so some drunk a--hole can zoom around on a scooter and the scooter companies make money?
If you make a claim and the other party doesn't have insurance (it's unlikely the law requires someone to have liability insurance for their bike) and you need to make a claim, you could be SOL, but that's really a problem with how insurance companies operate.
As far as requiring these things be in bike lanes, it's all well and good to say that. But at least in my city, there seems to be a ton of confusion from bike riders, cars and pedestrians alike about what the exact laws are, let alone reliable enforcement of these laws.
Cops are rarely going to see misuse anyway, so that wouldn't have helped the parent poster.