Ministers are considering overturning a decades-long ban on electric scooters, Segways and hoverboards as part of a wide-ranging review of the future of urban transport.

Jesse Norman, the transport minister, said he would “look quite closely” at finding a way of allowing e-scooters and similar vehicles on the road – potentially through a permit or licensing system – something that has been illegal for at least 30 years.

In the past 18 months, e-scooters have become a common sight in many cities in the US and Europe, but in Britain people have been prosecuted for riding them on public roads and footpaths. “E-scooters, e-bikes, e-mopeds, e-skateboards – we’re seeing these all over the streets already and we’re thinking about those modes of transport,” Norman told the Observer.

“We’re going to look quite closely at what the wider environment is for a lot of these different vehicles. How these things might be either permitted or licenced or regulated to go on to the road, or other forms of land.”

Motorised scooters have been around in various forms since the petrol-powered Go-Ped was invented in the 1980s, followed by the Segway in 2001 and hoverboards and self-propelled unicycles in the past few years.

As each version has arrived, however, so did the court cases. In 1999, a man was found guilty of being drunk in charge of a “motorised skateboard”, although he later won an appeal. Courts have upheld other convictions and, last October, a 15-year-old boy was given six points on his future driving licence by Teeside magistrates for riding at high speed on an e-scooter. As the law stands, riding an e-scooter on the pavement is an offence against the Highway Act of 1835, while riding one on the road is an offence against the Road Traffic Act 1988 unless you have a driving licence, insurance, helmet, road tax and a registration plate – something the DVLA refuses to provide for “unroadworthy” vehicles.

Calls to change the law are coming from scooter-share companies, which didn’t exist until 2017 but are now attracting hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital.

Scooter-share firms are in more than 100 US cities and have spread recently to Paris, Zurich and Lisbon, among others

These firms have combined scooters with smartphones: people use an app to find a scooter, ride it to their destination, then leave it for someone else. In the US, it typically costs $1 to unlock a scooter and riders are charged around 15 cents a minute. Companies, such as Lime and Bird, the first two to set up in the US, pay people (“Bird Chargers” and “Lime Juicers”) to find, collect and recharge the scooters overnight.

The service has become wildly popular with commuters for the first and last parts of their journeys.

“We’d like to be able to pilot the service on cycle lanes and minor roads and be treated the same as a bicycle,” Bird’s Harry Porter said. “We want to be able to demonstrate its viability.”

Scooter-share firms are in more than 100 US cities, and have spread to Paris, Barcelona, Antwerp, Brussels, Vienna, Zurich, Copenhagen, Malmö, Lisbon, Zaragoza, Malaga and more. The two big firms have been joined by rivals such as Spin, Skip, Ride, Yellow, Scoot and Voi. Uber and Lyft are also entering the fray.

Yet not every city has benefited from e-scooters. A 90-year-old woman in Barcelona died after being hit at a reported speed of 30kph and Madrid decided to ban e-scooters in December. Research by a US consumer organisation found there had been at least four deaths and 1,545 accidents involving e-scooters in 2018.

Norman, who often cycles to work, says he is aware of road safety issues. “I wouldn’t trust myself to go two yards on an e-skateboard,” he said. “I haven’t used an e-scooter, but I’ve used a scooter on many occasions and I’m an e-biker, so I’ve got a pretty good understanding of the experience.”

The Department for Transport is to launch a report in the coming weeks that will look at “urban mobility” issues including self-driving cars, car and bike sharing, drones and internet-connected vehicles, as well as e-scooters.

“At the moment, you cannot legally ride a scooter on a UK road or pavement, but we see a lot of them being ridden and they’re not on private land,” Norman said. “There’s a question of how we react to that. And that, in turn, relates to a question about safety. We want to create a transport system that is as safe, resilient and convenient as possible.”