Can we tackle the complexity of new, small vehicles?

It helps me to write this up to have all my thoughts in one place, but also to get feedback on what I'm saying here. I'm very happy to get criticism, tell me if this was already solved in a paper or writeup that I haven't read.

One main question is WHAT are all these new vehicles that we've been seeing since 2017? The options to name these apparatus are numerous and many times conflicting, and we feel like describing Superman ("it's a bird! it's a plane! It's Superman).

Is it micromobility (as per SAE, ITDP, ITF)? is it e23w (electric two and three wheelers, as per UNEP)? is it "small things with wheels (as per NACTO)? Is it LEV (light electric vehicles)? Do we include those 100% pedal-powered? How do active travel and micromobility interact and intersect (this was well discussed by Cook and others recently as well). Should we consider those with one wheel? four wheels? What are the thresholds for weight, speed, width and other characteristics? Should we follow the decades-old definitions from the Netherlands, EU, California or should we start from scratch? I'm not ready to bang the gavel on that one, but the term I've used more frequently is "small electric vehicles" (which may make things even worse...). And... where can they ride? Should we create new forms of infrastructure for these, or should they use regular bikeways and footpaths? Should "slow lanes" - Gabe Klein's term - be created for this? Or Light Lanes (ITF)?

A question that we've finally left behind is if we should let them roll in our cities (but...see more below). We finally have acknowledged that the explosion of new types of vehicles happened. I think we're also happy to see people choosing to drive / ride a smaller electric vehicle than a larger one (a car, ICE or electric), because their impacts on society, efficiency, environment are much less harmful.

However, the rosy picture is fine as long as we don't let things "just happen and see what they do". Many of us agree that we shouldn't just watch things as they unfold. This is a bad approach, and things won't "arrange themselves". The market will push, policy will not work, and terrible things may happen. In fact, all these three things have happened during the time we've been learning about this. Scooters go on sidewalks annoying pedestrians, cars run over ebikes when they go on certain avenues, and cyclists are annoyed at power ebikes if they go on the bikeway. They don't have a proper place to ride, and leaving it to anyone's will just doesn't work. It can't be laissez fair.

Hence, a good way forward is understanding HOW we have to move forward in acknowledging these new vehicles. Several of the sources I mentioned above have already put forward frameworks, ranging from very simple ones ("let everyone ride in the same place, let's just make it bigger and better") to complex ones (tables of several rows and columns defining what can happen where and under what circumstances and for which vehicle thresholds). From my end, I also proposed a framework (the "Periodic Table of Mobility") that ended up being so complex I had to hire a programmer to explain it with an online platform. What to do to move forward without becoming overwhelmingly simple or complicated?

I think the basic issue surrounding all this is that we're at a new level of complexity than before, and that citizens should have much clearer (and simpler, or easier to understand) guidance on what they should do. We have painfully learned that this can no longer be a black/white question (motorized vs non-motorized or 2 vs 4 wheels), but that - following the same comparison with black and white - it's an issue of having a wider color spectrum at our hands. Given that, we can't continue using the same rules to adapt them to this newer situation.

And here is where I should conclude with a way forward, providing a genius "new way" of developing the right policies and inviting people to act upon this... but I can't. I guess I'm writing this to find help, or guidance. In my search for answers, I've looked at:

- The history of evolving from Alchemy to Chemistry (which was a transformation from 4 main elements to an entire framework to describe a larger - and growing - list of elements) - this inspired my Periodic Table, but it doesn't seem to have caught on;

- Newton's theory of color, which understood how color works and how it's a wave of light rather than something that is just "printed" onto a surface;

- Regulation of communication channels with radio, internet and other wireless signals (too complicated for me to understand, but something Jeff Tumlin suggested way back when NUMO was starting- I didn't really follow up!);

- Wayfinding and transit information systems (which I worked on with brilliant design professionals to help understand how to make Bogotá's transit wayfinding system less painful - government didn't pay attention to that work; and tech experts on digital wayfinding systems, which helped solve the problem by giving "the machine" the main role to answer users' questions but it was too expensive to solve for every case and anyone without a cellphone);

I do think that the approach should follow two main rules:

-- having principles as main guidance for citizens, so they can understand where rules are coming from and how to act when they don't know the details of a specific situation;

-- using several tools (digital, design, etc) to reduce complexity while preserving differentiation of new vehicles' characteristics and the space where they travel.

Help?