One way to navigate London roads—those zigzagging, mostly narrow paths often without their names posted at intersections; the one ways, the dead ends, the traffic circles—is to follow a 5-year-old grandson on his bike from his school to the local playground and then to his home. That works quite well. But that covers only about 6 miles, and London has 70,000 streets—just a few of them straight—that traverse roughly 9,200 miles.

There is a website, nextvacay.com, that judges London to be the second most difficult city of negotiable roadways in the world—only No. 2? With Toronto first?—and there is no argument here.

This is not to disparage the United Kingdom’s capital. London is a swell place, diverse and alive. Aside from the abundance of must-see attractions, there are parks and playgrounds in abundance; everywhere are runners, bicyclists, children, dogs. Outdoor marketplaces and pubs bustle.

There is the possibility of a night at the theatre—equal to New York City’s Broadway fare—a day at one of many museums or an uplifting classical music concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. A lunch of fish-and-chips. Such touristy activities as walking the zebra crossing on Abbey Road. Going to the Tower of London. Checking out Big Ben. In early summer, there are afternoons at the pub watching Wimbledon tennis on outdoor big-screen televisions in a garden setting.

But, the truth is, you wouldn’t want to drive in London. (I did—many, many years ago—but I learned my lesson.) To get around, those familiar red double-decker buses are handy and efficient—if you know the number of the bus to board for your destination. The Tube or Underground—in existence since 1863, with 11 lines that cover 250 miles in 32 boroughs—is really nifty, though sometimes one of the 272 stations is a healthy walk away.

Walking, in fact, is a great option. But, even on foot, it’s easy to lose one’s sense of direction. Unlike, say, New York’s central borough of Manhattan, London is not laid out on an easily navigable grid. London’s streets are wormy; they don’t go North/South and East/West. And they’re quite narrow because they existed long before automobiles did. A bus ride in London—especially viewed from the upper deck—is an eye-roller of an adventure, providing an impressive, and sometimes unnerving, insight into the need for precise skills required with motorized traffic in confined spaces.

I have now been to London 27 times. On vacations, on assignments as a Newsday reporter, back when our daughter chose London for her NYU semester abroad, and mostly in recent years since she settled there with her Scottish-born husband and their young son. And I’m still not especially confident that, on my own, I could find my way from Paddington Station to Regent’s Park. Or between any other pair of sites.

I certainly don’t have, and only recently have read about, The Knowledge, derived only in a severely demanding three-year-long process put to prospective London taxi drivers, whereby they successfully commit to memory every street, address and landmark in the city. Test-takers have been asked to name the whereabouts of flower stands, laundromats, commemorative plaques.

The London street map has been described as “a mess….a preposterously complex tangle of veins and capillaries, the cardiovascular system of a monster….’’ Peter Ackroyd, author of the 800-page “London; the Biography,” has written that Londoners themselves are “a population lost in [their] own city.”

According to a New York Times report, the trial a London cabbie endures to gain The Knowledge “has been called the hardest test, of any kind, in the world. Its rigors have been likened to those required to earn a degree in law or medicine.” One fellow claimed to have logged more than 50,000 miles on a motorbike and on foot to win his cabbie’s badge.

There was a cognitive neuroscientist who studied the human hippocampus, an engine of memory deep in the brain, and found that the hippocampus in London cabbies would grow and be strengthened like a muscle. After that study was publicized, a London cabbie named David Cohen told the BBC, “I never noticed part of my brain growing. It makes you wonder what happened to the rest of it.”

This may be small-minded: I’ll just follow that young lad on his bike and enjoy the show.