bizzywheels®️

@bizzywheels

..coming soon..a NEW dedicated digital platform and tools for the UK’s Taxi (Hackney) & PHV (Private Hire Vehicle) Industry | Your *everyday* made easier

London, England

Joined November 2019

1.3K Following

1.2K Followers

1.8K Posts

Pinned Tweet

bizzywheels®️ @bizzywheels

about 5 years ago

⚡️This is where the future of electric vehicle charging is going. Onboard EV batteries will most likely be a ‘last mile’ solution only. Major road routes will be powered and supply the majority of energy EV’s need. Fantastic! ⚡️

bizzywheels retweeted

City A.M.

@CityAM

14 days ago

Uber slams £340m London cabbie case as ‘completely unfounded’ https://t.co/UXXWzjpcay

bizzywheels®️ @bizzywheels

about 1 month ago

Ferrari Rejects Self-Driving Cars: 'We Want People To Have Fun, Not The Computer Chips' - https://t.co/ZVEr9PI8eX https://t.co/y1y7qrtrYh

bizzywheels®️ @bizzywheels

about 2 months ago

Self-driving cars 'lack common sense', says boss of company helping to develop them - Daily Mail https://t.co/TluPQQbc6E

250

Who to follow

TaxiPoint - UK Taxi News

@Taxi_Point

The official X page for TaxiPoint UK. Keep up to date with all the latest UK taxi industry news via our website and social media channels

Tony B

@Anthony23Bryant

Green Badge since '94. Licensed London Taxi Driver.

Cabbiezbadgeholder

@Cabbiez1

London taxi driver badge holder..premium badge holder for green/yellow badge holders https://t.co/LWToQ8dEb8

bizzywheels retweeted

60 Minutes

@60Minutes

about 2 months ago

London’s iconic black cabs are about to compete with AI-powered, autonomous taxis. But the city’s cabbies aren’t ready to hand over their keys. @AndersonCooper reports, Sunday on 60 Minutes.

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75K

bizzywheels retweeted

TaxiPoint - UK Taxi News

@Taxi_Point

2 months ago

DRAFT TAXI AND PHV BILL: King’s Speech bombshell as Government unveil biggest taxi law shake-up since Victorian era 🚨🚨 Discover the ins and outs of the new draft Bill right here 👀⬇️ https://t.co/ubVofWZiJZ

bizzywheels retweeted

Ihtesham Ali

@ihtesham2005

2 months ago

To get a license to drive a black cab in London, you have to memorize 25,000 streets, 20,000 landmarks, and the fastest route between any two points in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. It takes most people three to four years. A British neuroscientist asked the obvious question nobody had thought to ask. What does that actually do to a human brain? Her name was Eleanor Maguire. The study changed neuroscience forever. The exam is called The Knowledge. It was introduced in 1865, and the format has barely changed since. Applicants ride a moped around London for years with a clipboard strapped to the handlebars, tracing every possible route between every possible pair of points in the city. They get tested in person by an examiner who can ask them, on the spot, for the shortest legal route between any two addresses in a database of tens of thousands. Half the people who attempt it fail. The ones who pass have spent an average of four years studying full time and have taken the test 12 times before getting through. Maguire was watching a TV movie about it in 1995 when she had the idea. These were not ordinary people. They were people running one of the most extreme spatial memory training programs that exists anywhere on Earth. If the human brain could be reshaped by experience, this was the cleanest natural experiment anyone was ever going to find. She put 16 of them in an MRI machine. Their posterior hippocampi were significantly larger than the brains of matched controls. The longer a driver had been working, the bigger the difference got. A 40-year veteran had a measurably more developed hippocampus than a 5-year veteran, and both had more than someone who had never driven a cab. Here is why that finding broke a century of consensus. Until 2000, every neuroscience textbook in the world taught a version of the same idea. The adult brain is essentially fixed. You are born with a set number of neurons. Childhood is the window where the wiring gets laid down. After puberty, the structure freezes, and the rest of your life is just slow decline. Maguire's study was one of the first pieces of human evidence that this was simply wrong. Adult brains physically remodel themselves in response to what you ask them to do. Not metaphorically. Structurally. With grey matter you can measure on a scan. The skeptics had an obvious objection. Maybe people with bigger hippocampi were just more likely to become taxi drivers in the first place. The brains were not changing. The job was selecting for brains that already looked that way. So Maguire ran the experiment again. Properly this time. She recruited 79 trainees who were just starting to study for The Knowledge and 31 controls who were not. She scanned all of them at the start. Then she waited four years. Of the 79 trainees, 39 eventually passed the exam and 20 failed. She scanned them again. The trainees who passed had grown larger posterior hippocampi over those four years. The trainees who failed had not. The controls who never studied had not. The brain change was not selection. It was construction. The act of memorizing the city had physically rebuilt the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory, and the rebuild only happened in the people who actually did the work. There is a quieter finding from this research that almost nobody quotes, and it is the one I cannot stop thinking about. The drivers had a bigger posterior hippocampus, but they had a smaller anterior hippocampus. The brain had not magically expanded. It had reallocated. Tissue that was being used for one type of memory had been compressed to make room for another. When Maguire ran follow-up cognitive tests, the cabbies were measurably worse than controls at certain visual memory tasks unrelated to navigation. They had paid for The Knowledge with something else. The trade was real. She also ran a second control experiment that is the part of the story most people never hear. She scanned London bus drivers. Same hours behind the wheel. Same city. Same traffic. Same stress. The only difference was that bus drivers follow fixed routes. They do not have to navigate. Their hippocampi looked completely normal. The cab drivers had not grown bigger hippocampi from driving. They had grown them from the constant, active, effortful retrieval of spatial information from memory. That distinction is the entire study. Then in 2020, McGill researchers ran the inverse experiment. They tracked 50 regular drivers and measured how often they used GPS. The participants who relied most heavily on turn-by-turn navigation had measurably weaker spatial memory. When the researchers retested a subset of them three years later, the heavier GPS users had declined fastest. The hippocampus, the same region the cabbies had built up by ignoring shortcuts, was being slowly hollowed out in everyone else by accepting them. The mechanism Maguire spent 25 years documenting works in both directions. Brains grow what you make them grow. They lose what you stop asking them to do. The taxi drivers were running the most intense spatial memory training program on Earth. Most of the rest of us are running the opposite program without realizing it. Maguire died in early 2025. UCL's tribute described the cabbie study as a stroke of creative genius. She had spent her entire career on a single question. What does it physically take to remember something, and what changes inside a person who remembers a lot of it. The answer is the part that should change how you live.

ihtesham2005's tweet photo. To get a license to drive a black cab in London, you have to memorize 25,000 streets, 20,000 landmarks, and the fastest route between any two points in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. It takes most people three to four years.

A British neuroscientist asked the obvious question nobody had thought to ask. What does that actually do to a human brain?

Her name was Eleanor Maguire. The study changed neuroscience forever.

The exam is called The Knowledge. It was introduced in 1865, and the format has barely changed since.

Applicants ride a moped around London for years with a clipboard strapped to the handlebars, tracing every possible route between every possible pair of points in the city.

They get tested in person by an examiner who can ask them, on the spot, for the shortest legal route between any two addresses in a database of tens of thousands. Half the people who attempt it fail.

The ones who pass have spent an average of four years studying full time and have taken the test 12 times before getting through.

Maguire was watching a TV movie about it in 1995 when she had the idea. These were not ordinary people. They were people running one of the most extreme spatial memory training programs that exists anywhere on Earth.

If the human brain could be reshaped by experience, this was the cleanest natural experiment anyone was ever going to find.

She put 16 of them in an MRI machine.

Their posterior hippocampi were significantly larger than the brains of matched controls. The longer a driver had been working, the bigger the difference got.

A 40-year veteran had a measurably more developed hippocampus than a 5-year veteran, and both had more than someone who had never driven a cab.

Here is why that finding broke a century of consensus.

Until 2000, every neuroscience textbook in the world taught a version of the same idea. The adult brain is essentially fixed. You are born with a set number of neurons. Childhood is the window where the wiring gets laid down. After puberty, the structure freezes, and the rest of your life is just slow decline.

Maguire's study was one of the first pieces of human evidence that this was simply wrong. Adult brains physically remodel themselves in response to what you ask them to do. Not metaphorically. Structurally. With grey matter you can measure on a scan.

The skeptics had an obvious objection. Maybe people with bigger hippocampi were just more likely to become taxi drivers in the first place. The brains were not changing. The job was selecting for brains that already looked that way.

So Maguire ran the experiment again. Properly this time.

She recruited 79 trainees who were just starting to study for The Knowledge and 31 controls who were not. She scanned all of them at the start. Then she waited four years. Of the 79 trainees, 39 eventually passed the exam and 20 failed. She scanned them again.

The trainees who passed had grown larger posterior hippocampi over those four years. The trainees who failed had not. The controls who never studied had not. The brain change was not selection. It was construction.

The act of memorizing the city had physically rebuilt the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory, and the rebuild only happened in the people who actually did the work.

There is a quieter finding from this research that almost nobody quotes, and it is the one I cannot stop thinking about.

The drivers had a bigger posterior hippocampus, but they had a smaller anterior hippocampus. The brain had not magically expanded. It had reallocated. Tissue that was being used for one type of memory had been compressed to make room for another.

When Maguire ran follow-up cognitive tests, the cabbies were measurably worse than controls at certain visual memory tasks unrelated to navigation. They had paid for The Knowledge with something else. The trade was real.

She also ran a second control experiment that is the part of the story most people never hear. She scanned London bus drivers. Same hours behind the wheel. Same city. Same traffic. Same stress. The only difference was that bus drivers follow fixed routes. They do not have to navigate. Their hippocampi looked completely normal.

The cab drivers had not grown bigger hippocampi from driving. They had grown them from the constant, active, effortful retrieval of spatial information from memory.

That distinction is the entire study.

Then in 2020, McGill researchers ran the inverse experiment. They tracked 50 regular drivers and measured how often they used GPS. The participants who relied most heavily on turn-by-turn navigation had measurably weaker spatial memory. When the researchers retested a subset of them three years later, the heavier GPS users had declined fastest.

The hippocampus, the same region the cabbies had built up by ignoring shortcuts, was being slowly hollowed out in everyone else by accepting them.

The mechanism Maguire spent 25 years documenting works in both directions. Brains grow what you make them grow. They lose what you stop asking them to do.

The taxi drivers were running the most intense spatial memory training program on Earth. Most of the rest of us are running the opposite program without realizing it.

Maguire died in early 2025. UCL's tribute described the cabbie study as a stroke of creative genius. She had spent her entire career on a single question. What does it physically take to remember something, and what changes inside a person who remembers a lot of it.

The answer is the part that should change how you live.

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bizzywheels retweeted

Tom the Taxi Driver @TomTaxiDriver

3 months ago

Today I drove the Ford MaxiCab. I’m torn. My TXE is iconic. The turning circle is legendary. I love driving it. But the MaxiCab? Beautiful drive. For the driver and the passenger. Going much deeper on this. Still processing. Fire away if you have any questions

TomTaxiDriver's tweet photo. Today I drove the Ford MaxiCab.

I’m torn.

My TXE is iconic. The turning circle is legendary. I love driving it.

But the MaxiCab? Beautiful drive. For the driver and the passenger.

Going much deeper on this. Still processing. Fire away if you have any questions https://t.co/BSRDnAsRto

14K

bizzywheels®️ @bizzywheels

3 months ago

BMW and Mercedes Just Proved Tesla Was Right About Self Driving - Autoblog https://t.co/KzN9vCpkUd

bizzywheels retweeted

TaxiPoint - UK Taxi News

@Taxi_Point

3 months ago

SELF-DRIVING DISCLOSURE: Lawyers call for legal reform to access driverless vehicle data in injury claims 💬⬇️ https://t.co/0LPutYWJfj

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bizzywheels®️ @bizzywheels

4 months ago

BMW Drops £6000 Self-Driving Option From 7 Series After Buyers Ignore It - Autoblog https://t.co/XSMzF5Lw5q

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bizzywheels retweeted

bizzywheels®️ @bizzywheels

6 months ago

Tesla Quietly Pauses Its “Unsupervised” Robotaxi Rides as Reality Sets In https://t.co/WDdJZom3GN

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bizzywheels retweeted

TfL

@TfL

6 months ago

Celebrating our youngest taxi driver! 👏 Connor celebrated his 21st birthday today by collecting his Taxi Driver’s Licence. The Knowledge is open to anyone and takes dedication, hard work and determination - a proud moment for the taxi trade. Interested in a career in taxi driving? 👉 https://t.co/3XWUARj3JP