All change for the black cab driver: could the Knowledge be dumbed down?https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/all- ... -rcqd3jvvdIt typically takes four years to pass the Knowledge, the extraordinary feat of learning every road — and 320 routes — within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross in order to become a black cab driver.
But it is such an arduous process that it is deterring new recruits, with a drop of almost 3,000 drivers since January 2021. Transport for London (TfL), which regulates the trade, is conducting an official review that is expected to shrink how much they have to learn. At a meeting last Wednesday, the taxi trade said it wanted to reduce the time taken to two years.
Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association, said new entrants struggle to memorise the street map of London because the education system no longer teaches young people to learn “parrot fashion”. In an era of sat-navs, some see such learning as pointless.
He said: “We need to learn it in a different way to the way Fred [Housego, the taxi driver who won Mastermind in 1980] learnt it. The learning process is alien to anyone of a modern generation.”
Housego, now 78 and living near Eastbourne, East Sussex, took just over a year to pass his exams to become a cabbie in 1972, and said it was far harder than it was prepping for Mastermind.
For Mastermind, he only needed to read deeper into subjects he already cared about — the history of the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and the reign of Henry II — but to pass the Knowledge of London test, he had to memorise 25,000 streets and 100,000 landmarks within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. He also suffered three crashes while scouting out the routes on a moped.
While Housego took only 14 months to complete the Knowledge and pass the test, new applicants must brace themselves for an average of four years of rote-learning and gruelling reconnoitres, as if sat-navs had never been invented. Minicab and private hire drivers compete for passengers without having to undergo such arduous tests.
The essentials of the current system for qualifying as a black cab driver in London were set in 1865, in the era of horsepower and almost 40 years before the first petrol-driven taxis began to operate on the streets of the city.
Mastering the Knowledge is so challenging because it entails not only memorising locations but also the best routes between them. The core of the test involves memorising 320 routes, linking popular destinations such as theatres, embassies, nightclubs, hospitals and hotels.
But the examiners, who are also working taxi drivers, have the discretion to ask for directions to and from obscure locations, thus creating millions of permutations.
Some suggest they are overzealous, whether to restrict the number of entrants to their trade, or out of an all-too-human urge to make the younger generation suffer as they did.
The cognitive demands of the challenge of navigating London’s streets have endowed cabbies with an enlarged hippocampus, the region of the brain located in the inner temporal lobe associated with memory. Many question whether it is necessary in the era of TomTom sat-navs and apps such as Waze.
A report presented to the taxi industry and TfL suggests it is not. FreeNow, an app used to book taxis, minicabs, e-bikes and e-scooters, which has 10,000 black cab drivers on its platform, analysed their rides over a 12-month period to November 2022.
It found that a high proportion of journeys were to a very limited number of destinations. The top three are London County Hall, which is close to attractions such as the London Eye and the Southbank Centre; and 10 Whitehall Place and 4 Caxton Street which are both addresses near government departments.
A “heat map” of the most popular pick-up and drop-off points shows that 138 places accounted for 25 per cent of all fares, 1,152 points accounted for 50 per cent of fares and 15,407 places made up 90 per cent of all black cab rides. Very few passengers take a black cab deep into south and southeast London.
McNamara, who supports changes to reduce the time taken to learn the Knowledge, is adamant that the current review “is not about reducing standards or the knowledge that London cab drivers have”. He said that “an intimate knowledge of the city is essential”, particularly when driving in the centre of the capital when cabbies need to make rapid decisions on route-finding. “That sets us apart and guarantees that somebody [taking] a cab will get there in the quickest possible way.”
However, he said that it was legitimate for cabbies to use sat-navs in the outer suburbs and that the level of detailed knowledge required for those areas should be “less intensive”. He also criticised the “obsession” with requiring cabbies to master the entire area enclosed within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross “because a Victorian in a stiff collar stuck a compass in a map and drew a circle around it”.
He said that the radius could be reduced to four miles at some points, and expanded in others, to take account of changes in the city’s geography. He added: “We’re not afraid to change, and neither should our political masters.”
Mariusz Zabrocki, general manager of FreeNow, said the system needed reform because a shortage of black cab drivers has led to lengthy waiting times for passengers since mid-2022. “We see our customers start to use alternatives. I am confident we could have three, four or even five thousand more drivers in the black cab trade and all of them will be busy and all of them will earn well.”
Industry sources say the trade has enjoyed a strong recovery since the Covid-19 pandemic, and has benefited from the fact that Uber has become more expensive. Many black cab drivers earn more than £85,000 a year in fares.
Zabrocki said the testing regime, rather than the younger generation, was at fault. “Some drivers say people are getting more and more stupid, but in fact they are as smart as they were 50 years ago. Just the exam got harder.”
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