Mandated parking zones are very effective because you can't really end the trip if you're not on a parking zone, meaning that you keep getting charged until you park it in a parking zone.

Here you could leave the scooters anywhere for about a year, and it was nice because I could take one right to my doorstep - but my neighbours took them inside their house, and there were scooters everywhere taking up sidewalks. Around a year ago, it changed and now there are predefined parking spaces, around 50m or 100m from each other. I haven't seen "abandoned" scooters outside of parking spaces for a few months now, and a lot of people still use then anyway.