Location is very important here. London cabbies have to pass The Knowledge which is an extremely difficult memory exam that only people with particular kind of brain can do.
There's a fantastic Tom Scott video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWREtcDVBE
I am glad Uber plowed through various stupid regulations constraining supply to bring a service with drastically more supply.
What like safety checks?
London had a huge minicab system, which is very much not knowledge based. Addison lee also had internet booking of cabs way before uber, but with the advantage that cars were roadworthy and the drivers were safety vetted.
TFL came down hard on uber 1 for safety and 2 for clogging up the fucking roads and making busses slow. (see https://bsky.app/profile/garius.bsky.social for more info)
"which $generic_street_name? the one near covent garden, or the one near Bow?"
saves both time and money
Uber drivers are generally a joke compared to black cab drivers in pretty much every way
I would have expected someone to publish research comparing crimes against passengers by rideshare drivers versus taxi drivers by now, but a quick attempt to find that came up short due to lack of data about taxi drivers.
Stuff like "I'm your grandson, dadsnames kid" didn't parse at all, they said not to bring up shit like that so we didn't.
We had to move him into a house because he kept using his POW training to break out of the dementia ward. Pickpocketing keycards and shit, he was a badass till the end.
He told me he was so jealous of all this new computer stuff I get to play with. I think about that a lot this year
Also, The Knowledge Test is, IIRC, passed only once and then you do not have to retake it for the rest of your career.
If a test passed in your 20s or 30s predicted accurately a much lower incidence of Alzheimer's in your 60s, that would be a remarkably strong early signal. Not impossible, but worth extra scrutiny. For the vast majority of old age conditions, we cannot predict them so long in advance.
If you get into a black cab in London and ask to be taken to any location, anywhere within 6 miles of Charing Cross, that driver will know immediately the right route to take without satnav. To get to that point they need to know 25,000 streets and many, many landmarks - statues, museums, galleries, restaurants, hotels, and so on.
I used to regularly drink with a cabbie in London, and he said that every time somebody got in the back his heart rate would rise, as he'd realise he's "on" and about to have to work out where to head from scratch. Within 30 seconds he'd have every step of the way worked out, down to which lanes at which intersections, no matter where in London he was or where he was going.
That's the thing that's likely going to reduce Alzheimer's.
It would also be interesting to look at sleep traces of cabbies.
In the same way that you have code smell.
Granted, some use GPS, but most only really use it for pickup
Today this knowledge is arguably less useful.
That's yours speculation, isn't it?Because if so, it would corroborate the same conclusion, i.e. if you exercise your memory regularly, you are less likely to develop Alzheimer's.
A number of the women in my wife's family have been diagnosed with Alzheimers. All of the women I know in her family also hate driving, because they find it very stressful.
It's plausible that people prone to Alzheimers are less likely to be comfortable driving.
When I was in my early 20s I had a job delivering pizza. I very quickly learned the delivery area, I knew pretty much every street and alleyway and shortcut to get from one place to another. Much smaller than London but I think the human brain is very good at remembering routes and where things are in an area, as this would have been an evolutionary advantage (go out hunting and be able to find your way back). No GPS, didn't even carry a map with me. We had a large map on the wall at the store, and if I had to deliver to a street I didn't recognize I'd find it on the map, see where it was relative to the streets I did know, and then I never had any problem finding places.
What? In my country at least (France), taxis have been a thing even in the countryside for as long as cars existed (or rather, as long as the telephone has). And I'd be very surprised if that wasn't also the case in most of Western Europe.
In fact it's a much easier job when it comes to routing and knowing your passengers' destinations than doing it in a metropolis.
More than one time I got stuck somewhere and had to walk 4 hours home.
This was not the case everywhere. For instance, Ireland deregulated taxis in 2002, and service improved massively after that.
It's funny how many amazing tech developments are really just a reaction to the peculiar pathologies of American/SF culture.
Not at all, it's more like 6 hours if you're in a somewhat remote place, but most taxi trips are way smaller than that even in rural area anyway.
> Not to mention that the population in this usa countryside is already way lower then any population density in the whole of France.
I don't think it matters, as there are plenty of rural places in the US that still have a higher density than where I live.
> Operating a taxi corp there would simply be not viable on a financial term.
Probably not a taxi “corp”, but here taxis have always been independent businesses with one or two cabs an providing taxi service on an area of a few hundred of square kilometers (a radius of 50km or so around the "office" of the taxi driver). And a large fraction of the trips are not on demand, but upon reservation several days in advance (you know you'll need to go to a medical appointment to the city next month, or you need a ride to the train station later this week).
But in any case, I found that if you want to remember routes, it is far better to study the route before you begin driving, and then not rely on CarPlay altogether. This gives you much higher awareness of street names and directions.
As a bonus you can even set your general location on the mirror for extra accuracy, since the earth's magnetic line directions differ a bit based on location.
My parents had the same model van, but an earlier year; we didn't have the fancy digital compass mirror, just a suction cup compass ball.
Here's an example https://www.amazon.com/example/dp/B0FZSFWJQR that I'm not endorsing.