Taxi Driver's

I read a BBC article that Brandon McCloskey posted titled, “How Good Software Makes Us Stupid”.  It talks about how taxi drivers in London and other big cities used to have to pass a test showing that they knew all the streets in the city and that they could get around.  However, now thanks to navigation systems this is all changing and more reliance is being placed on the technology.  This really made me think, because I have been in taxis and experienced this first hand multiple times. 

One of those times was last year when I had the opportunity to go to Sydney, Australia where I had my first real experience with taxis.  One day my sisters and I had been out sightseeing but then we needed to get back to our hotel. We had been walking everywhere, but we ended up getting really tired and so we decided to take a taxi back to our hotel.  Since we hadn’t planned on taking a taxi back to the hotel we weren’t very smart and didn’t have our hotel address with us, since we knew how to walk back.  When we told the taxi driver the name of the hotel he knew right where it was and how to get there even without us showing him the way.   He explained to us how they are required to know the city so well that they can get people wherever they need to go, and he did just that.

That was very impressive to me.  I think that in the case of taxi drivers that a human being will probably be able to navigate better than the GPS, with the exception of if they are going somewhere that they have never been and never heard of.  I think that taxi drivers should still be required to pass that test, but then they should also have a GPS in case they need it sometime, but it shouldn’t be their only way to navigate.