Why taxis became yellow around the world

HostIf you stand on a busy street corner in almost any big city and look for a ride, your eyes just naturally hunt for that bright splash of yellow. It's like our brains are hard-wired to think that yellow means taxi. But why that specific color? I mean, why not bright red or a nice sky blue? How did one color end up taking over the streets of the world?

GuestIt actually goes back to a guy in Chicago named John Hertz in the early nineteen hundreds. Back then, if you wanted a car to take you somewhere, it was a total mess. Most cars were black or dark blue because that was the cheap paint available for Fords. If you saw a car coming, you had no idea if it was a private person or someone looking for a passenger. Hertz wanted to start a big fleet of cars that all looked the same so people would recognize them. He didn't just pick his favorite color, though. He wanted to find a color that stood out from blocks away, even when the weather was bad or the sun was going down.

HostSo he just looked at a bunch of paint chips and picked the brightest one?

GuestNot quite. He actually paid for a study at a local university to find the color that stayed easy to see for the longest distance. The researchers found that a yellow with a tiny bit of red in it was the winner. It turns out that yellow is the easiest color for our eyes to pick out against the grey of a city street and the dark colors of other cars. It pops more than anything else when things are moving fast. But the choice was as much about business as it was about science. Before Hertz, people who drove cabs were often seen as a bit sketchy. The cars were dirty, the drivers would overcharge you, and there was no way to tell who was who. By painting every single car that exact same lemon yellow, he was telling the public that his cars were safe and fair.

HostI don't know, I feel like red is way more eye-catching. Isn't that why we use it for fire trucks and stop signs? Red screams for your attention.

GuestRed is great at getting you to look, but it actually disappears faster as it gets dark. Yellow stays visible much longer when the light starts to fade. Plus, Hertz was trying to build a brand. He called his business the Yellow Cab Company, and it blew up. He started selling his cars to other cities, and everywhere they went, people loved them. But while Chicago was turning yellow because of one guy's business plan, New York City had a totally different path to the same color.

HostSo New York didn't just copy the Chicago guy?

GuestWell, there was another guy in New York named Albert Rockwell. He started a cab company around the same time and also went with yellow, but for a much simpler reason. His wife just really liked the color. So for a long time, you had all these different companies using yellow, but they weren't the only ones on the road. Up until the late nineteen sixties, you could paint your taxi any color you wanted. You had green cabs, checkerboard cabs, even red and white ones. It was a rainbow of cars out there.

HostThat sounds like a nightmare if you're trying to flag one down in a hurry. How did it go from a choice to a rule?

GuestThat's where the city government stepped in. By nineteen sixty-seven, the city was having a huge problem with "wildcat" drivers. These were guys who didn't have a legal permit to pick people up on the street, but they would do it anyway. It was hard for the police to tell who was legal and who wasn't just by looking at the cars. To fix the mess, the city passed a law. They said if you have one of the official licenses to pick up street hails, you have to paint your car yellow. Every other car that worked for a private car service had to be a different color. That way, if a person on the sidewalk saw a yellow car, they knew for a fact it was a real, licensed taxi.

HostThat seems like a massive reach for the government, though. Telling a business owner they have to paint their own property a specific color just to make the city's job easier?

GuestIt was a big deal, and not everyone was happy about it at first. But it worked. It made the system much safer and easier to use. Because New York is such a huge hub for media and movies, that image of the yellow cab became the global symbol for city life. When people in other countries wanted to start their own cab companies, they looked at what worked in Chicago and New York. They saw that yellow meant trust, safety, and being easy to find.

HostIt's strange to think that such a huge part of how we see our cities started because one guy wanted to stand out from black Ford cars and another guy's wife had a favorite color.

GuestIt shows how a simple choice can turn into a standard that lasts a century. Even today, when you open a ride-sharing app on your phone, the little car icon on the map is almost always yellow.

HostThat bright paint turned a random car into a promise of a safe ride home, which is why we still look for that splash of sun in a sea of grey traffic.