bolchevich

Street view itself is out of date (Charing Cross footage was taken around August 2014). It won't be able to show you non-static nuances, or road conditions. For example, some sets of lights may be more notoriously slow than others to change. Street view won't show you which roundabouts has the bigger problems with congestion, etc.

You're right that The Knowledge itself is not "live" however for those who pass the test and do become cab drivers, they will inevitably get near-live data as they drive around doing their job, and conversing with other drivers, police, council workers over the course of time and learn about changing to traffic conditions.

Remote work can only function if the teams have both the communications tooling to support it and the team and organisational culture aspects to keep it up. I find most fail at the latter, because they don't know how to be sufficient enough in communication with the tools they have. Talking to face the face has much more communication bandwidth than anything else out there.