What City Requires Aspiring Cab Drivers to Undergo Years of Training?
Taking a ride in a traditional black cab in London is usually much more expensive than using a ride-share service like Uber. It can toll double. Just the cab drivers say they offer much better value for money because they can get you to your destination much more quickly and more efficiently, fugitive sudden traffic jams, roadwork or one of the many protestation marches that regularly disrupt traffic flow in the British capital. And they provide a mine of information for their passengers. They can exercise this, they claim, because of "The Knowledge," their full command of the layout of the city.
"When someone asks for a destination, yous've got the whole of London in your head. That's 36 square miles. That'due south quite a large expanse," blackness cab commuter Sean Paul-Twenty-four hours told Marketplace on a recent trip through the heart of the metropolis.
"To become the license to bulldoze a black cab is a very stringent process," he said.
"I had to commit to retentiveness 25,000 streets and 50,000 points of interest, like pubs, clubs, galleries, monuments and museums. Only when yous tin prove that you tin navigate proficiently between those points are you allowed to work as a taxi driver in London."
Paul-Mean solar day must accept a phenomenal retention, yes?
"I've got the whole of London in my head."
"No better than anyone else's," he insisted. "It's quite amazing what we can think when we put our mind to it."
He's being also small. The mental effort required to learn the names and location of every street, avenue, mews and cul-de-sac within a 6 mile radius of Trafalgar Square, also as 50,000 points of interest, is mind boggling.
The calibration of the task becomes apparent when you enter a small, nondescript, prefabricated office building on an industrial estate on the far eastern outskirts of the city. These are the unassuming headquarters of the London Cognition School, one of a number of schools preparation the blackness cab drivers of the futurity. Within, more than a dozen aspiring drivers pore over large maps of the capital for upward to eight hours a mean solar day, memorizing the whole higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge of the metropolis and testing each other on the quickest routes through the maze.
"Take me from Tate Modernistic to West Finish Fundamental police station, delight," asks one of the students while some other closes his optics, furrows his brow and reels off the itinerary.
"Leave on left, Kingdom of the netherlands Street, right into Summertime Street, right into Southwark Street, forrard into Stamford Street…"
Doing The Knowledge so sitting more than a dozen grueling exams can take anything from three years up to a decade, depending on whether the student is devoted full fourth dimension to the task. The dropout rate, unsurprisingly, is loftier: 70%. Only is The Knowledge still necessary? Won't GPS exercise just also?
says Chris Campbell, owner of the London Knowledge School.
"Absolutely not," said Chris Campbell, the possessor of the school. "At that place have been a number of tests in which a London blackness cab commuter has been pitted confronting GPS, and the cab driver, with his intimate noesis of London, the pitfalls, the places, the picayune intricacies, has beaten the GPS every unmarried fourth dimension."
Whether e'er-improving engineering science will one mean solar day outpace the knowledgeable cab driver is another matter, but Campbell argues that The Knowledge performs another useful function: It'due south a test of character.
"You demand existent grit and determination and perseverance to get through information technology," he said. "That makes for a more dependable driver."
Once qualified, cab drivers earn an average of $45,000 to $50,000 a year. Not spectacular, but in spite of that and the rigors of The Cognition, there's no shortage of wannabe drivers at Campbell's school.
"I'thousand doing it because I desire to be my ain boss," Brett Lynch, a security van driver, told Market. Blackness cab drivers are all independent, cocky-employed sole traders who own or hire their cabs. "I want to be able get out and work when I want. Piece of work for still long I desire to work for. I want to be able to spend more than time with my two young sons. Information technology's the flexibility that appeals to me," Lynch said.
In spite of the attractions of the task, many licensed blackness cab drivers feel that life is getting tougher for them in the British uppercase.
"Our biggest beefiness," said Angie Clarkson of the United Cabbies Group, which represents around 2,500 of the 20,000 drivers, "is that the authorities in this town accept allowed more than than 100,000 untrained ride-share drivers to swamp the streets of the upper-case letter. They cause a lot of congestion, and we don't believe they offering anything similar the reliable service we offer. They certainly don't have The Knowledge," she said.
The British government clearly favor increased contest, and many Londoners seem pleased to pay the lower fares of the ride-share operators, notwithstanding unfair that may seem to the black cab drivers.
But y'all won't notice many cab drivers lament most the years they spent learning the layout of the urban center.
"I definitely don't regret doing The Cognition," said driver Paul-24-hour interval.
"London is an incredibly fascinating metropolis, and only when you've washed The Knowledge practice yous showtime to relate to your surroundings here, all the architecture and the landmarks. I remember if you were glued to a GPS system, which keeps yous on these rigid, structured routes, I don't think that would be whatsoever fun at all," Paul-Day said.
He said no 1 could regret learning that all-important skill — in driving as in life — of knowing where you're going.
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Source: https://www.marketplace.org/2019/05/14/london-taxi-drivers-hail-the-knowledge/
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