Famously, cramming The Knowledge into your head induces plastic changes to your hippocampus: https://www.nature.com/news/the-knowledge-enlarges-your-brai...
So cool!
The Knowledge of London for cab drivers
21–30 of 47 posts
Re: The Knowledge of London for cab drivers
#22Why would someone go through this prep for 4 years when they can just register through uber and start driving?
Job security, better pay.
Re: The Knowledge of London for cab drivers
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't matter these days. Google Maps just works, I've driven in London dozens of times with absolutely no issues. There is zero reason to continue to have such a complicated test for taxi drivers when satnavs are so effective, all it does is raise costs for riders and make it harder for people to become drivers.
Please don't take this as a personal attack, but I see this sort of attitude as the crux of the tech "disruption fetish". I'm guilty of the same thing often, but I have to push myself to see past the tech solution and to the human expertise it is replacing. Also this isn't so much a defence of cabbies, I don't use them and think them expensive an antiquated. It's a defence of the process being a better one than the r…
Tech often does this, it takes a thing, deskills 95% of it, and puts the people who can do the missing 5% in a horrible situation where they can't make enough money to live. Instead they see other people making more than them by half-assing their profession.
I was a Carpenter and Joiner. Crappy gangs with nail guns and battery saws could compete with me on some of my work, leaving too little of the skilled stuff to make a living. CNC stair builders churned out a demonstrably worse but cheaper version of what my workshop made. My Dad, long past retirement age, is still living on the crumbs these kids leave behind. When he dies there will be none left in our old patch that can do some of the old skills, like traditional roofing (where prefab trussed rafters can't be used).
I am not 100% clear that this is a better world.
I use the tube in London, but black cabs are still the premium service.
Re: The Knowledge of London for cab drivers
#24I'm sure a regulatory body run by its members can find all sorts of reasons to justify its existence so that competition can be kept at bay and high wages maintained.
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Re: The Knowledge of London for cab drivers
#25It's worth nothing that London is a huge mess of random streets. There is no grid pattern here, its still using the medieval street patterns, plus a whole set of one way routes and no stopping areas. That's why this is so complex. Roads are also all named, sometimes confusingly. "One poultry" is a road, not a building, you'll need a number to go with that to get to a building. "Crutched Friars" is a street. "Blackfri…
What you call not 'a huge mess' (NYC say) I call soulless modernity. It's not like it even has the advantage of relentless practicality, see Times Sq for example.
Re: The Knowledge of London for cab drivers
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't take this as a personal attack, but I see this sort of attitude as the crux of the tech "disruption fetish". I'm guilty of the same thing often, but I have to push myself to see past the tech solution and to the human expertise it is replacing. Also this isn't so much a defence of cabbies, I don't use them and think them expensive an antiquated. It's a defence of the process being a better one than the r…
Tech often does this, it takes a thing, deskills 95% of it, and puts the people who can do the missing 5% in a horrible situation where they can't make enough money to live. Instead they see other people making more than them by half-assing their profession. I was a Carpenter and Joiner. Crappy gangs with nail guns and battery saws could compete with me on some of my work, leaving too little of the skilled stuff to m…
> CNC stair builders churned out a demonstrably worse but cheaper version of what my workshop made.
That sounds like is is better by the standards the customer cares about. The trick, I think, is realizing when your goals and those of your customer diverge.
Re: The Knowledge of London for cab drivers
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't matter these days. Google Maps just works, I've driven in London dozens of times with absolutely no issues. There is zero reason to continue to have such a complicated test for taxi drivers when satnavs are so effective, all it does is raise costs for riders and make it harder for people to become drivers.
Please don't take this as a personal attack, but I see this sort of attitude as the crux of the tech "disruption fetish". I'm guilty of the same thing often, but I have to push myself to see past the tech solution and to the human expertise it is replacing. Also this isn't so much a defence of cabbies, I don't use them and think them expensive an antiquated. It's a defence of the process being a better one than the r…
> stopped listening to people who have collectively been doing it for a century.
My butt has been a butt for a few decades now, and I don't have to listen to a thing it says. Perhaps mere duration does not automatically imbue a practice, habit, arrangement, or person with value and wisdom worthy of preservation.
If we came upon the idea today, and someone told me they had memorized a ton of streets, could sometimes do marginally better than GMaps, and therefore deserved to be paid a major premium over what GMaps could do, we would be skeptical of the cost/value tradeoff. Except, perhaps, as a luxury service for the upper crust.
Re: The Knowledge of London for cab drivers
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't matter these days. Google Maps just works, I've driven in London dozens of times with absolutely no issues. There is zero reason to continue to have such a complicated test for taxi drivers when satnavs are so effective, all it does is raise costs for riders and make it harder for people to become drivers.
Please don't take this as a personal attack, but I see this sort of attitude as the crux of the tech "disruption fetish". I'm guilty of the same thing often, but I have to push myself to see past the tech solution and to the human expertise it is replacing. Also this isn't so much a defence of cabbies, I don't use them and think them expensive an antiquated. It's a defence of the process being a better one than the r…
Far from London, in San Francisco I found that yellow cab drivers could often (but not always) take me to where I wanted if I gave a cross street or described an area of the city. Uber and Lyft often couldn't because Google Maps is surprisingly unreliable when it comes to searching for cross streets. Just my house was an example, yellow cabs I could usually tell the cross street and they knew it immediately, and Uber/Lyft I usually had to give the full address and then wait while they typed it in. Part of this is because humans can retain a lot of location-specific intuition - I lived at the intersection of a regionally important through street and a university. Cab drivers knew the through street, and knew what part of it the university streets were in... the rest was just driving down it until they saw the right university.
I also had a LOT of experiences with Lyft drivers that were clearly very new to the city and lacked basic awareness of unusually set up but major intersections, and near-rush-hour traffic patterns. This lead to things like going the wrong way on one-way streets and missing turn lanes.
Software still has a long ways to go before it can adequately capture and work with that type of region-specific organization.
Re: The Knowledge of London for cab drivers
#29It's worth nothing that London is a huge mess of random streets. There is no grid pattern here, its still using the medieval street patterns, plus a whole set of one way routes and no stopping areas. That's why this is so complex. Roads are also all named, sometimes confusingly. "One poultry" is a road, not a building, you'll need a number to go with that to get to a building. "Crutched Friars" is a street. "Blackfri…
It doesn't matter these days. Google Maps just works, I've driven in London dozens of times with absolutely no issues. There is zero reason to continue to have such a complicated test for taxi drivers when satnavs are so effective, all it does is raise costs for riders and make it harder for people to become drivers.
It doesn't, especially recently with lots of road closures and such.
One journey I know and have had to do regularly to look after a relative since lockdown, Google maps takes a significant journey of around 30 minutes when I or a cab driver can do it in less than 15.
One wrong turn and a lack of initiative from a driver can lead you to a very long journey given the destruction of the central London road system
Re: The Knowledge of London for cab drivers
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tech often does this, it takes a thing, deskills 95% of it, and puts the people who can do the missing 5% in a horrible situation where they can't make enough money to live. Instead they see other people making more than them by half-assing their profession. I was a Carpenter and Joiner. Crappy gangs with nail guns and battery saws could compete with me on some of my work, leaving too little of the skilled stuff to m…
> CNC stair builders churned out a demonstrably worse but cheaper version of what my workshop made. That sounds like is is better by the standards the customer cares about. The trick, I think, is realizing when your goals and those of your customer diverge.
The problems with ignoring every signal but price should be obvious.
How many people understand whats important in a roof joist when they are having their new home built?