As a nature lover, I was horrified recently to read of a threat to the great German Schilderwald. Parts of it had already been cut down, I learned, and further pockets were disappearing every day. But the future was potentially even more bleak. If the forces of so-called progress got their way, the once-vast Schilderwald might soon be reduced by half, writes Frank McNally.
Pondering this environmental catastrophe, my mind went back to hazy summer days spent hiking along forest trails near Baden-Baden. I remembered a pleasant picnic on the shores of Lake Titisee, in the afterglow of Stuttgart '88. Then there was that little restaurant we found in the woods outside Freudenstadt, with its delicious Wiener Schnitzel and wonderful home-brewed beer, served with a smile by the lovely Heidi.
The Schilderwald could not be allowed to disappear, I knew. And my protest placard was already at the design stage before it struck me that - wait a minute - it was the Schwarzwald I was thinking about.
So I read the full article in the Wall Street Journal Europe, and discovered that the Schilderwald - "sign forest" - is just a humorous name given by Germans to their country's dense thicket of road signs. There are 648 different types of sign, apparently, occurring at an average of one every 28 metres. They warn about everything from dirty roads (Verschmutze Fahrbahn) to toad-crossing points (Kroten-Wanderung!). And whatever about the toads, the signs appear to be prolific breeders. They have multiplied, almost unchecked, for decades.
But now, according to the WSJ, Germans are fighting back against this menace. For several years, the country's automobile association has worked with municipal authorities to identify unnecessary signs and cut them down (or uproot them, to be exact: that way they don't grow again). And although it is slow and painstaking work, the hope is that the Schilderwald can be reduced by 50 per cent, eventually.
SIGN REDUCTION IS the moderate wing of a reformist road-design movement now afoot across Europe. The militant wing promotes a concept called "shared space", which involves the complete elimination of signs, traffic lights and other street furniture, in favour of a free-for-all in which road users just pay more attention to each other. The theory is that excessive regulation has reduced our sense of personal responsibility, to everybody's detriment.
Take, for example, our trust in traffic lights. As most male drivers under 35 will know, a typical traffic light has five colours: almost-green, green, orange, just-red, and red. Problems arise, however, when the almost-green signal from one direction coincides with the just-red from another. By removing the lights completely, it is argued, traffic engineers would force everyone to be more careful, and encourage a return to simple eye-contact between road users.
A leader of the shared space movement is Hans Monderman, who designed a successful pilot project in the Dutch town of Drachten. Since shedding its lights and warning signs, Drachten has improved traffic flow and eliminated serious accidents. Any collisions have been minor; and minor collisions are vital to the project's continued success. As the man responsible explained in one interview, the system "works well because it is dangerous". Monderman says he is not an anarchist, just an engineer who realised that signs were counter-productive. He has been known to illustrate his beliefs by walking backwards into traffic, confident that drivers will adjust their behaviour to cope.
Another of his ideas is that all roads have a narrative quality. "Every road tells a story," he says. "It's just that so many of our roads tell the story poorly, or tell the wrong story."
Which brings us to Drumshanbo. The Leitrim village was this week the subject of a complaint by one Gabriel Burns (Letters, Monday), who said that on a previous visit there, he witnessed "the worst set of road signs I had ever seen," but that the situation had since deteriorated. The town's signs now pointed in every direction except the right one, he lamented, and their information was further obscured by "decorative hanging basket plants".
I haven't been in Drumshanbo lately, and cannot comment definitively. But it sounds to me that what Mr Burns described is part of Ireland's own Schilderwald. It could be that the road signs in Leitrim are interbreeding - not just with each other, but with local flora. This might explain why the sign for Carrick-on- Shannon, say, is pointing in the wrong direction. It may just be growing towards the light.
On the other hand, there are large swathes of Ireland where, if anything, the problem is an absence of signs. The Schilderwald does not flourish in the midlands, for example. And in certain border counties, soil conditions are so poor that many crossroads can support only one or two direction signs, rather than a full set of four.
Anyway, long before Hans Monderman, I was arguing that Irish road signs are best understood as part of our ancient story-telling tradition. That way you can appreciate their creative blend of fact and fiction, their heroic myths (references to "24-hour bus lanes" when there are no 24-hour buses, for example), and even their occasional red herrings, deliberately designed to throw the reader.
Above all, seeing road-signs as stories helps you to enjoy their elliptical quality, something common to all good narratives. By eliminating vital pieces of information, Irish signage forces the reader to make his own deductions. Thus like a good novel, a back road keeps you guessing. And you can never rule out a surprise ending, when it takes you somewhere completely different from where you were expecting to go.