IT'S not every day you get flagged down by stranded drivers when you're on your bicycle. It happened this morning though.

I was riding to the office and was stopped by a lady waving frantically from the pavement. Her car was parked at the side of the road, and she obviously had a problem as her hazard lights were flashing. In fact, it turned out that her hazard lights were the problem. She couldn't turn them off. She didn't know how to. She was clutching her owner's manual to her chest like Holy writ, but it might as well have been in Hebrew and Greek for all the use it was to her.

She told me she'd bought her car about four weeks ago but had never worked out what the various switches and buttons did. She'd hit the hazards when she meant to turn on the heated rear window and pulled over when she'd got fed up with the warning lights flashing at her. She asked me if I could turn the flashers off for her.

I did, then talked her through turning the hazards on and off, how to work the foglight switch, the wipers (how has she got by with no wipers in the UK?), the various modes for the lights and finally the array of tell-tales, with particular emphasis on the brake and oil warning lights. She drove off happily, and I rode away scratching my head, metaphorically at least.

Presumably, this lady had trained and passed a test at some point in the past. How do we have a system that allows someone to take one relatively short course of lessons to learn basic car control skills and then never, ever have to develop those skills? It's not as though driving is an insignificant activity. Getting it wrong has serious consequences.

Tests today are certainly harder to pass - even for no other reason than there are more of them. But even leaving aside the lack of training in hazard management and observation, there's a massive gap post-test. There are some excellent schemes like PassPlus, but they are in the minority. Most drivers simply drop the L-plates in the nearest bin and never think about their driving again. Key in - brain off.

The Government knows this, but also realises that ongoing driver training (let alone testing) is a seriously hot political potato.

I doubt any Transport Minister wants to be the one to propose ongoing driver training on his watch. We've even had road safety pundits saying that there's no point in training drivers and riders as they just kill themselves faster.

The logical conclusion from that argument would see us closing every school in the UK - there's no point in teaching children, they just learn things faster But we're bumping along the bottom with casualty reduction. We've gone about as far as we can with making cars safer for their drivers (and occasionally safer for the pedestrians they hit).

We've got more gadgets on a modern shopping trolley car than were ever on Jackie Stewart's 1970s F1 racing cars - anti-lock brakes, traction control, seatbelt pre-tensioners, side impact bars, blah blah blah. But we're still killing more than 3,400 people a year and the rate of decline has now slowed dangerously. We need to look at new ways of reducing road deaths. Training, anyone? We do it in every other area of our lives, so why not on the road?

So why train? Why bother? What's wrong with just driving about and hoping for the best? Quite a lot, actually.

If drivers and riders knew what they could achieve through training there'd be queues at the door.

It's not about car control itself, it's about the mental processes that underlie car control and prevent crashes happening.

It's the difference between controlling a skid and not getting into one in the first place. With 90 per cent of crashes being down to driver and rider error, it's got to be worth a look, hasn't it? And if you still don't know where your hazard warning switch is, call me, OK?