This is a reader's letter sent in to our newspaper this week.

Eighteen months ago, a member of my family, who is in her 80s, was jostled off the pavement by a crowd of shoppers in Broad Street and caught her foot on a plastic ramp, which the city council had installed across the gutter outside Blackwell’s causing life-changing and excruciatingly painful injuries.

Had her head struck the edge of the kerb, a couple of inches away, she could well have died.

As it is, she has lost much of the hearing in one ear and there are things she used to do that she can no longer do but, thanks to three weeks in the JR2, surgery, and the skill and dedication of the NHS trauma and neurology teams, she is slowly recovering.

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The ramp concerned was made of hard plastic and stuck up vertically across a part of the road that is designated for use by pedestrians and which, at busy times, becomes to all intents and purposes a part of the pavement.

In addition, this particular ramp had a jagged hole on one side, which could have been designed to gash the ankle and topple anyone who tripped against it.

Concerned to save others from injury, or worse, I wrote to the city council.

I have always respected our local authorities and naively expected that it would promptly replace the ramp with something safer.

To my astonishment, the highways team replied that the ramp “is considered to be safe” - despite having just very nearly killed someone!

The weeks went by and nothing happened.

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I wrote again to the council, but no reply, I wrote in turn to two senior councillors of the controlling Labour Group with relevant responsibilities. 

Neither bothered to reply.

Informed that council members “no longer answer emails”, I contacted our two ward councillors directly.

Weeks have gone by but neither has got back to us.

A year after the accident, the council has now replaced the ramp outside Blackwell's with a dropped kerb (proving that it can provide safe access if it wants to) but, meanwhile, to my horror, it has also installed a new yellow ramp opposite Blackwell's completely unguarded and identical to the one that caused this horrible accident.

What are they thinking? Has some lawyer told them to clam up and carry on as before?

Or, knowing that (unlike motorists and cyclists, frail, elderly people rarely, if ever, complain), are they simply “too busy with other things”, to bother?

Cluttered with bins that hang around for days, criss-crossed by a cat’s cradle of cycle lanes and scarred with potholes, our pavements are a nightmare for vulnerable people.

Those responsible are young now.

When they too are old and frail, they will understand the trauma an elderly person suffers when s/he trips on a broken kerbstone.

Sadly, by then, it will be too late for them to do anything about it.

Patrick Gray (Oxford)