Why people still spend years memorising every street in the capital when a phone will do it for nothing

The Knowledge Is London’s Hardest Exam and Its Strangest Business Decision

On a wet Tuesday morning in north London, a man in waterproofs is riding a moped very slowly round a one-way system with a clipboard fixed to the handlebars. He is not lost. He is the opposite of lost. He is committing a junction to memory, as he has committed thousands of others, and he will be back tomorrow to do the next one. He is studying for the Knowledge, and he has been at it for the best part of three years.

From a business point of view, what he is doing looks close to madness. He is investing years of unpaid study to acquire a skill that a free app on a phone appears to perform instantly. I wanted to understand why anyone still does it, and whether the sums add up. So I spent a fortnight in cab shelters, at a Knowledge school and in the back of a good many taxis, asking.

What the Exam Demands

To drive a black cab across all of London, a candidate must learn hundreds of set routes and every street, landmark, hotel, hospital, theatre and club within six miles of Charing Cross. They are tested in a series of one-to-one oral examinations in which an examiner names two points and the candidate recites the most direct route between them, turn by turn, from memory. The process is overseen by Transport for London and commonly takes three to four years.

Most candidates do it while holding down another job. They ride the routes on a moped at dawn and call them over with a study partner at night. The drop-out rate is high. Everyone who has passed can tell you exactly where they were when the examiner finally shook their hand.

The Investment Case

Set the romance aside and treat it as a start-up. The cost of entry is years of your time, plus the moped, the fees and the maps. At the end you hold a licence that lets you ply for hire on the street, which no other driver in London may do. You can be hailed. You can use the ranks at stations and airports. You can use most bus lanes. That exclusive access is the asset the study buys.

Then there is the vehicle. New black cabs must be capable of running with zero emissions, and the electric models that meet the rule are expensive, whether bought on finance or rented by the week. Drivers I spoke to were frank that the cost of the cab is now a bigger worry than the competition. Several older drivers have chosen to retire and hand back the badge instead of taking on the debt.

The Arrival of the App

The ride-hailing firms changed the market completely. They brought a very large number of private hire drivers onto the streets, guided by satellite navigation, at fares that often undercut the meter. Cab drivers responded with protests, legal challenges and a good deal of colourful language. The number of licensed taxi drivers has fallen considerably over the past decade, and the number of new candidates starting the Knowledge fell with it.

And yet the trade did not collapse. Black cabs joined apps of their own. Card payment became universal. And customers discovered that there are things a hailed cab does well: it is there now, it is wheelchair accessible by design, the fare does not surge when it rains, and the driver knows that the road your phone is recommending has been closed since Monday.

Does the Knowledge Still Beat the Phone

I put this to a driver of twenty-two years as we crossed town at a brisk pace through streets I did not know existed. He was diplomatic. The satnav knows where the traffic is, he said. It does not know why. It does not know that the school on the corner lets out at half past three, or that the lights at the bottom of the hill favour the other road. He then delivered me four minutes ahead of my phone’s estimate and declined to gloat, which I thought showed class.

There is some science to it as well. Well-known research at University College London found that the part of the brain concerned with spatial memory was larger in London taxi drivers than in comparison groups, and grew with years in the job. Whatever else the Knowledge is, it is not a trivial feat.

A Language of Its Own

The cab trade is one of the last strongholds of old London speech. A driver who has passed is a butter boy in his first year. A slow period is the kipper season. Private hire cars are, in the mouths of some cabbies, not suitable for print. If your driver tells you the traffic on the frog and toad is diabolical, he means the road, and the guide to Cockney rhyming slang will see you through the rest of the journey.

The Verdict

As a pure financial calculation, the Knowledge is a harder sell than it was a generation ago. The costs are higher and the monopoly is narrower. But the people still doing it are not fools. They are buying independence, a trade that cannot be taken off them by an algorithm changing its commission, and a job in which they are their own boss. Several told me that was worth more than the difference in earnings.

The regulator has been looking at how to bring more recruits in, and anyone tempted can find the licensing rules via GOV.UK. I would only advise buying good waterproofs.

The black cab driver is a stock figure of London comedy, and the London satirical news desk and the wider British Onion tradition have never been short of material from the front seat. NewsThump has contributed its share. For an account of where that kind of humour stops and reporting starts, see what satirical commentary is, and what it is not. This was the reporting, and the man on the moped is real. My other work is on my author page at The London Prat.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/