"The Knowledge"

This definitely should be adopted in DC, as well as several other U.S. cities.

From Wired...

Every black-cab driver in central London has to have “The Knowledge” — a memorized map of the capital, including some 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks, right down to the order of theaters on Shaftesbury Avenue. 

It’s a brutal learning process that can take three to four years to complete, with a final test — the Knowledge of London Examination System — that often takes 12 attempts to pass. Even then, ultimately only half of the trainee cabbies ace the exam. 

According to a report published in the journal Current Biology, successfully learning this mental atlas of London’s spaghetti streets causes structural changes in the brain, affects memory and creates a greater volume of nerve cells in the brain’s hippocampus.