News you can use for a few more years at any rate.
From The Conversation, August 6:
Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s – how complex mental maps and spatial reasoning protect your brain
Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S.
These findings stopped me in my tracks because those two jobs rely on the same thing as my own work: maps.
I have spent more than two decades staring at maps. Not paper maps on a wall, but digital ones with multiple layers: flood boundaries draped over census blocks, car crash hot spots plotted against road geometry, and satellite readings of rainfall stitched across river basins. Much of my work as a civil and environmental engineer is done through GIS – that is, geographic information systems. Engineers like me hold several spatial relationships in their minds at once, reasoning about where things sit relative to one another across scales ranging from a city block to a whole watershed.
I always assumed that spatial reasoning across map layers was purely professional. But that study on taxi and ambulance drivers made me wonder whether all that mental work might be doing something good to the brain.
Taxi driver brains
Of the 9 million death certificates from January 2020 to December 2022 that researchers examined, taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest risk of dying from Alzheimer’s disease out of 443 occupations. After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall.This pattern did not extend to other driving jobs. The researchers concluded that the key to reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s was not driving itself but continuous real-time navigation: the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change. Drivers whose jobs relied on fixed or predetermined routes, like bus drivers and aircraft pilots, didn’t seem to experience a similar advantage....
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No mention of GPS, curious.
However! From Bloomberg's CityLab, July 31:
A London Taxi Family Confronts the Driverless Future
With more than a century of combined experience behind the wheel, the Gouldings now face their greatest challenge yet: Waymo, Wayve and Baidu.
I wasn’t sure at first whether the taxi driver who arrived for my usual predawn work pickup had also driven me a few days before. The name was different, but Ron looked curiously similar to my driver from last week.
Time and light banter eventually cleared things up. I hadn’t been hallucinating before my caffeine hit — my two recent drivers were identical twins. More interesting still, the twins were the sons of a taxi driver whose own mother kept cabbies fueled with tea, coffee and sandwiches from one of London’s traditional Cabmen’s Shelters. Two other brothers had also followed their father into the trade. Together, they form a remarkable London taxi family.
The black cab business has been good to the Gouldings. It hasn’t made them rich, but it provides a very comfortable living — without a boss to answer to. This proud clan’s heart is David, 70, the family patriarch, who took up the trade 42 years ago to support his young family. With his twin sons Ron and Billy, 44, following in their father’s footsteps — and their younger brothers, David, 40, and Harry, 38, close behind — the Goulding tradition spans more than a century of combined experience behind the wheel.
Like many long-standing traditions, the world in which they operate — London’s taxi trade — keeps confronting new threats. The centuries-old industry has survived wars, the onslaught of Uber, and Covid. Black cabs remain one of London’s defining symbols for many, alongside Buckingham Palace, Sunday roast lunches and Paddington Bear.
But the trade faces perhaps its greatest disruption yet: competition from vehicles with no driver at all. Still in testing mode, autonomous taxis could, pending government approval, offer driverless rides to Londoners by the end of the year. Their arrival could arguably prove a greater shock in the city than elsewhere. London is, after all, home to the world’s most thoroughly trained cabbies, who spend up to four years completing “the Knowledge” — a famously rigorous memorization of the city’s street plan.The Map in Their Minds
Introduced in 1865, the Knowledge remains one of the world’s toughest professional qualifications. Candidates master the city’s streets through intensive visualization, training so rigorous that studies have shown it can physically reshape the brain. One study even found that London cabbies outperform GPS navigation apps in some respects.
Ron would agree. While he occasionally uses navigation apps to verify obscure addresses, he says GPS often misses taxi-only routes. He recalls winning over one skeptical passenger by ignoring the satnav and taking a faster route using bus lanes which are open to licensed taxis in the UK. The passenger was so impressed that he left a tip and said, “I trust you.”....
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Back in 2015 we were already seeing:
Uber Introduces Its Video Knock-off of "The Knowledge"
A month ago This Is Money was reporting that the number of drivers taking "The Knowledge", the notoriously difficult geographical test required to become a London black-cab driver, had dropped by two thirds as new aspirants hooked up with Uber and GPS rather than the black cabs.
Well now Uber has rolled out a video game version of The Knowledge for its San Francisco drivers, call it "Grand Theft Uber"....
