Picture a Premier League player arriving at the ground 90 minutes before kickoff. Nobody questions why. He’ll stretch, jog, have his heart rate brought up gradually, run through set pieces mentally before he’s touched the ball. Nobody calls this indulgent. It’s the job.
Now picture a delivery driver clocking in, getting straight into the cab, and pulling onto the motorway within minutes. Nobody questions that either. It’s just the job, done differently.
The UK’s professional driving workforce is around 87% male, and in HGV driving specifically that figure climbs close to universal. It’s a workforce we talk about constantly in the context of mental health and wellbeing, and rightly so. But there’s a quieter question sitting underneath the wellbeing conversation, one we don’t ask as often: if performance and safety genuinely matter to us, would we actually give this workforce the time to prepare for it?
Elite athletes don’t just show up. Warm-up isn’t wellness, it’s professional expectation, built into contracts and training schedules because the evidence long ago closed the argument. The gap between how we treat athletes and how we treat professional drivers isn’t really about money, though the salaries obviously differ. It’s about what we’ve decided counts as a performance role worth preparing for.
London is currently having this conversation whether it wants to or not. Waymo has started testing driverless taxis on London’s streets, and the company’s own figures claim 90% fewer crashes causing serious injury, and 92% fewer pedestrian-injury crashes, compared with the average human driver over equivalent distance. Those are Waymo’s numbers, not independently audited ones, but they’re the ones shaping the public conversation, and London’s black cab drivers know it.
The usual response to this is defensive: humans are still better in ways machines aren’t, judgement, instinct, decades of accumulated road knowledge. That’s true, but it’s also beside the point, because it accepts the frame that human driving is fixed and machine driving is the only thing capable of improving.
It’s worth remembering that human drivers aren’t a fixed quantity either. The London cab driver studies, showing measurable growth in the hippocampus as drivers built The Knowledge, are well known. What’s less discussed is that the value was never really about memorising streets, Google Maps has made that specific skill close to obsolete. The value was in demonstrating, concretely, that a demanding cognitive task reshapes the brain of the person doing it. Navigation was simply the task that happened to be available to study.
So here’s the obtuse version of the argument: what if the answer to human drivers being fallible isn’t to hand the job to machines, but to treat human performance the way we already treat every other safety-critical, performance-critical role? Thirty minutes at the start of a shift, not admin, not paperwork, but structured cognitive preparation, the mental equivalence of the warm-up nobody questions in sport.
We’re not there yet. This isn’t a study we’ve published, and we’re not claiming it is. It’s a direction we think is worth taking seriously, and one we’re beginning to explore with fleet operators. There are real questions to work through, employment law, union agreement, what “on the clock” means for preparation time rather than driving time. Those aren’t small questions, and we don’t intend to wave them away.
But the underlying point stands regardless of how those questions resolve. We ask professional drivers to be alert, responsive and safe for hours at a stretch, in a role where a lapse in attention has consequences most jobs simply don’t carry. We give athletes 90 minutes to prepare for a job that lasts 90 minutes. We give drivers zero minutes to prepare for a job that can last all day.
If we’re serious about safety and performance rather than just talking about them, that gap is worth closing.
Most school leaders are on annual leave this week. The Department for Education picked exactly that moment to publish three documents that will shape how every mainstream school in England spends its inclusion budget for the next three years.
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We’re about to begin work in several new prisons and it’s prompted us to write down something we don’t say often enough publicly: the difference between a programme that survives its first six months and one that doesn’t rarely comes down to the content.
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