The pregnant response from a Mairie in France

I wrote to a local council in France concerning a dangerous road that could benefit from speed humps to slow taffic down. There had been more development of housing further up the hill and naturally more traffic that made the job of getting out of the development near the bottom much harder.

The letter I sent was dated the 2nd June 2009. The response was sround nine months later in their letter dated 8th March 2010. Not bad for a "pregnant letter response"!

In fact my original letter was dated the May 2005 (which was hand delivered) and although other local residents contacted the Mairie on the same subject they never bothered replying. They did however put some "slow down" markings in the road, but these have been well worn away now and need to be done again.

The Mairie replied in their two paragraph letter of the 8th March saying it is dangerous to put speed humps on a bend. If they had put at least two of these in place on the section of road in question they would not actually be on the bend. I might consider replyling, knowing perfectly well that the response could take a long time.

I did in fact email the Mairie last September about the issue of these speed bumps (not knowing their response to my 2nd June letter was in fact being dealt with in a very slow process) however the emails were never replied to.

Do you have any similar experiences? (If so please reply on this blog)

This not quite like the help I received from a local Councilor in Dublin, Ireland a while back. I contacted this person about a road issue and whether it was because there were elections due a while later or the fact that the councilor was very professional, a report on the road was actually sent by Dublin City Council. Altogether very good customer services.

In England when I recently had to contact the local Council on an issue, replies were very quick in coming back.

So what is the problem in France. Is it like with retailers if you want to return a product. They can't handle customer service. I am certainly very cautious when I go shopping in France to make sure I don't buy the wrong product or one I don't want. Ireland certainly does customer service a lot better.