Signspotting

It’s hard to imagine a world without signs.

No stop signs, no arrows, no speed limits, no warnings. No bright colours screaming for your attention. Take a good look next time you step outside – signs are just about everywhere. In the county of Kent, England, alone (presumably the only county that bothered to count), they discovered they had 140,000 signs.

But do we really need them – any of them?

In 2007, the German town of Bohmte (population 13,000) decided to remove all of their signs and street markings. They even took away the kerbs, footpaths and traffic lights. And they’re paying more than 2.3 million euros to do it. Why? Because – this is true – they wanted to make their roads safer. They had tried speed traps and crosswalks – the usual fixes – but those didn’t seem to keep the cars and trucks from racing through their main street, treating pedestrians and cyclists like expendable supporting characters in a video game.

Taking a page out of the reverse psychology handbook, Bohmte decided drivers were too comfortable with signs – to the point thatthey ignored them. By removing them, they believed drivers would get nervous and hit the brakes. The roads were remade with a burnt sienna brick to give a subtle indication that drivers were entering a special zone.‘Generally speaking, what we want is for people to be confused. When they’re confused, they’ll be more alert and drive more carefully,’ Bohmte’s deputy mayor, Willi Ladner, told the Washington Post just as the new system opened.

What happened? One eyewitness, Tony Paterson, a newspaper reporter from London’s Independent, noted that vehicles that ‘pass along this stretch of sign-free road seem to be driven by swivel-headed paranoiacs with rubber vertebrae.They crawl along at little more than 15 miles per hour [25 km/h], their occupants constantly craning their necks to make doubly sure that they are not going to hit anything, be it a pedestrian, cyclist, or even another car.

We hope you enjoy the following signs from the third volume of our popular Signspotting series.