I had a neighbour that was doing the knowledge. We used to hear him practise in the back garden with his wife. Hearing her shout random routes at him like "Buckingham Palace to Bank Tube" and him spouting one road name after another was pretty amazing.
If you're ever in London and you see a guy (or girl) on a bashed up moped with a clipboard strapped to the handlebars, they are learning their routes for The Knowledge.
Google isn't (yet) quite as good at predicting traffic though. For example, a cabby would know that if a Chelsea game's finishing at 5pm, he should avoid Stamford Bridge.
Thanks, that's a great example of where the real-time data collection is not as good as the local knowledge! Unfortunately that depends on whether the driver cares about football (or similar events in the city). I hope that waze/google/other services will start including information like that in the future.
Absolutely, and I honestly don't think we're far away from Google or someone (...but probably Google) integrating all of this data. Times for football fixtures, events at the O2 and planned demonstrations are all accessible online, it's just a case of an automated system parsing them and deciding the impact.
TFL and AA road watch know that so there is no reason Google couldn't. It's all data - after all the cabby most likely got it from the same data through a different aggregation medium (radio/paper).
If you're ever in London and you see a guy (or girl) on a bashed up moped with a clipboard strapped to the handlebars, they are learning their routes for The Knowledge.