ILLUSTRATION: PAUL RYDING
A few years back, the German municipality of Bohmte implemented a definitely not mad strategy to improve driving standards in its town centre: removing all the road signs.
The theory? That drivers would be more considerate when they weren’t ordered what to do. The results of this trial were, it seems, inconclusive, though there was an encouraging 70 per cent rise in motorists asking who’d nicked all the signs to der Bahnhof. But recently I’ve been wondering whether Bohmte (and other similar ‘shared space’ schemes across Europe) got things back to front.