Digital age launches attack on the wisdom of cabbies
Taxi drivers may be latest victims of technology, as many other industries have gone before them
London taxi drivers are the best in the world. Every taxi driver in every city says that, but London has a major claim to the title. Before any cabbie can take passengers for payment in a "Fast Black", they have to pass a test called "The Knowledge".
The Knowledge demands that they must know every little street in London. They must be able to get from one place to another by the quickest and shortest route possible, incorporating traffic, repairs and a myriad of little side streets. Few satnavs can beat a cabbie's brain.
For years, as I was riding my tiny, polluting but exhilaratingly speedy scooter around the City of London, I would often gather at a red light with a couple of compadres; I in my "whistle" (whistle and flute = suit) and they in jeans and ragged duffel jackets.
On the front of their scooter would be fixed a clipboard with a page of the A to Z on it. The A to Z is the bible of city street maps, first designed in 1936 by Phyllis Pearsall, who got hacked off by the fact that London, with a layout dating from the Middle Ages, had no decent maps. Not possessing a scooter, she walked 4,800km in her registration of the 23,000 streets in the A to Z.
The scooter riders might spend a day surveying district EC2 so that they could get from the Bank of England, down Cheapside, past the one-way streets of Old Jewry and Ironmonger's Lane, to Gutter Lane, with their eyes closed. This would be repeated until the scooter riders had covered the postal codes of the whole of London, a massive area.
It takes three years to learn everything within a 10km radius of Charing Cross and collect the coveted Green Badge which entitles the driver to bore passengers about football, the wife, the weather and football. And to assure that London cabbies are the best in the world.
The dedication to hard work, time and commitment that a London taxi driver has invested; this skill, this competitive advantage, is about to evaporate. Burgeoning smartphone apps, like Über or Lyft, allow the user in a city to "request a ride at the push of a button". Say you are standing in Trafalgar Square and you want to get to Heathrow Airport. A London taxi will cost you £75 (HK$975) while a private, unlicensed individual driving a car will quote £33.