Red faced Mayor's parking mistake causes gridlock

Lorraine Hillier, the Mayor of Henley, is having a bad week. She parked up in a loading bay when she popped into Sainsbury's in Henley-on-Thames - thinking nothing of it - and accidentally caused traffic gridlock.

Hillier left her Nissan Rasheen SUV in the loading bay on Monday lunchtime, without paying quite enough attention to the traffic around her. In fact there was a drainage lorry directly opposite, parked on double yellow lines, in order to carry out emergency sewer repairs. It turns out that she hadn't left a big enough gap between her car and the lorry.

Just after she left her car, a lorry tried to squeeze through the gap. As it was too wide, it had to wait for Hillier to return to her car, and traffic quickly built up behind it.

A passer-by, Rob Strike, took a photo, and uploaded it to Facebook. He said that after four or five minutes: "A lorry had not been able to pass causing the whole of the town centre to block up and was gridlocked. The lady came back out to her 4wd and totally ignored the several cars and lorries tooting their horns at her and loaded her SHOPPING and drove off allowing Henley to go back to normal. Please see pictures attached to name and shame Her Worship the Mayor Miss L M Hillier of Henley. You really should know better and also have some respect for the rules and regulations of your own Town."

The story was shared hundreds of times, and Facebook users were quick to condemn what they felt was thoughtlessness or arrogance.
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Is it fair?

The story went viral, hit various news outlets, and Hillier went onto BBC Radio Oxfordshire to defend herself. She said she had only been in the shop for three minutes to pick up five items that had been left out of the delivery to her business, that she was entitled to park in the loading bay because she was driving a work vehicle and buying items for her shop, and she apologised to anyone who had been held up in traffic.

During the interview, she added that there had been some "unnecessary abusive comments" online.

She has since commented on news stories, apologising and explaining her position. She seems keen to set the record straight and make it clear that the only thing she is guilty of is not calculating whether a lorry could fit through the gap between her car and the drainage lorry.

Her approach seems to have got some people's backs up, but there are other mayors who clearly would care far less, and be more willing to throw their weight around. One of the most brazen was in 2012 in Logansport, Indiana, when the Mayor received a ticket for illegally parking his Corvette.

He wasn't given the ticket immediately: in fact a traffic officer contacted his office asking for it to be moved first, and it was only after three hours when the car remained parked that the ticket was issued. The Mayor did pay up. However, he also ordered the city to paint him a parking spot in the police car park (twice the size of a normal spot) - complete with a chain and post to separate it from the police cars.

Maybe if apologising and explaining doesn't get the Mayor of Henley anywhere, she can always consider taking this sort of approach instead.