If you have read this blog before you may well remember the entry about being stuck in a traffic jam on the M11… you may even have left a comment about it on here. I complained to the Highways agency about the appalling way we were treated, and I may make the complaint more formal yet.
It took a bit longer than the ten working days that they said it would take for me to get a reply, and I had to send in another email to get a response, and sadly, the response I got was as formulaic as you would expect. This is faceless bureacracy at its best… don’t get me wrong, it reads as if the Highways Agency do in fact accept responsibility for the muck-up, but you can’t get to a single person being held accountable. All I would like at this point is for one person to stand up and say “yes – it was my job to get thsi organised on the day and I didn’t manage it too well”. We all make mistakes, and we all struggle to get otehrs to do their jobs from time to time. Clearly there was a lot of struggling going on that day! I am assuming here that teh police didn’t think the weight of traffic on a Saturday was going to be sufficient to emrit closing a junction, or putting up some warning signs… or that the police had to await a direct order from the relveant officer in the Highways Agency. I don’t think the police can be absolved of all blame here, since they should have been able to see what was going on as well as we could.
If you missed it the original posting about this is here
If you click on the icon for this blog entry it will open in a new window at full size so you can see what the HA sent back to me.
Not particularly impressive is it? We really ought not to be treated like this by anyone, did we?
If you would like to let me know if you were stuck in that jam (or any other, come to that) and you want to have an input to a letter I write to the Highways Agency next, just leave a comment – but leave your name as well!