When I lived in London I once read a text from my wife to a black cab driver with instructions of where I was supposed to meet her for dinner.
Even though I didn't have the correct name of the street (and didn't have the name of the restaurant at all!), the driver got the right street and the right restaurant. (The street had probably 10+ restaurants on it.) I was astonished, and have never forgotten it.
Re:Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch
by brokenmachine on Thursday January 18, 2018 @10:28PM
(#16183929)
Here in Sydney, Australia, the taxi drivers are generally hopeless and in many cases can hardly manage basic English, let alone navigate properly.
That's why I understand Uber has become popular but not all of my experiences with Uber have been so crash hot either.
Yes, very much so. The road layout in London is absolutely insane, because the city was established in AD 43. Finding efficient routes requires a great deal of local knowledge and contextual understanding.
Black cab drivers are extremely good at minimaxing journey time. If they have a choice between a route that always takes 30 minutes or a route that sometimes takes 25 minutes and sometimes takes an hour, they'll usually choose the former.
They're required to memorise both routes and landmarks, so they're phenomenally good at fuzzy matching for destinations. If you ask to go to "that place where all the goths and weirdos hang out", they'll take you straight to Camden Lock. They have an uncanny knack for getting confused tourists back to their hotel, based on the scantest of descriptions in the most broken of English.
Uber has a role to play in London, but it's undoubtedly an inferior option. Black cab drivers are a part of the fabric of London and it'd be a tragedy if they were pushed out of business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws-eyqWHNPs