These were originally horse-powered Hackney Carriages, first licensed way back in 1654. These 20,000 rotund and affable cabs provide the world's best-trained taxi service. To start, trainees memorize four hundred basic routes, each containing dozens of streets and points of interest, providing well over one million route combinations. Ten percent of applicants quit immediately. Forty percent fail the appearances.
Grown men cry.
Divorces and breakdowns are not uncommon among those who seek the Knowledge. Your brain just locks up, and then he could ask you your own name and you wouldn't know it. Melodramatic maybe, but much is at stake. To complete the Knowledge takes three to four years. The cab costs another 4,000.