NOT too long ago road accidents were caused in quite straightforward ways, really.

They were either a result of mechanical failure of the vehicle, drink driving or just driver incompetence. Some were also caused by careless pedestrians and a proportion by sheer chance.

Today, the situation is far more complicated and the reasons why more than 180,000 people (the latest figures available from 2015) are casualties of road accidents in a single year much more varied.

While the original reasons remain, add to those drivers on drugs, texting, making calls on their mobile or watching some hi-tech device. In fact, drivers using mobile phones were involved in crashes killing the equivalent of one person every 10 days last year.

The really interesting change, though, is in pedestrians. People of all ages, although probably mostly under 40, walk along pavements either looking at phones or with earphones in and lost in their own music.

I almost had a collision with a young woman the other day. She wandered across a road without a glance at traffic and didn’t even spot my car until she almost walked into it. Fortunately, I’d seen she was wearing earphones and in her own world so slowed to almost a stop. But she was definitely an accident waiting to happen.

Under these circumstances, the use of the warning horn is redundant. People are now so used to texting on their phones or blocking out the world with earphones that they just don’t notice the traffic around them.

We also suffer from the demise of that simple device: the cycle bell. That little warning bell probably fell out of fashion when cycling got really serious and started to be so costly and so much a part of the fitness regime of men and women.

I often use the Middlebrook trail, the 19km route from Bolton to Middlebrook. I always understood it was intended for cyclists and walkers who happily co-habit all sorts of areas. However, several times cyclists have suddenly appeared at speed from behind with no warning very close to walkers and collisions could easily have resulted.

Some will shout out to alert you of their presence but the old-fashioned cycle bell would have done the job here. I suppose it’s too late to bring it back – but then serious cyclists might not like the idea of something that appears to come out of Noddy tales.