Why are school buses yellow?
Today a school bus is easy to spot: big, boxy and yellow. But school buses did not always look alike. The yellow you know was picked at one meeting in New York City in 1939 — and the people in the room chose it with early mornings in mind.
In 1937 a professor of rural education named Frank W. Cyr began studying how children got to school. According to Teachers College, Columbia University, where he taught, he “had found that children were riding to school in all kinds of vehicles, including trucks and buses of all different colors.” One district had painted its buses red, white and blue, and “In Kansas, one district transported children to school in horse-drawn wheat wagons.” The companies that built buses had a problem too: because every school district could make up its own rules, they could not build the same bus over and over on an assembly line.
Basis: Teachers College, Columbia University, “Frank W. Cyr, ‘Father of the Yellow School Bus,’ Dies at the Age of 95” (August 1995). Quotations unchanged.
So in April 1939 Cyr organized a conference at Teachers College that “drew transportation officials from each of the then 48 states, as well as specialists from school-bus manufacturing firms.” Together they wrote the first national standards for building school buses, and one of them was the color. Fifty years later Cyr remembered how they did it: strips of different colors were hung on the wall, and the group talked until they had narrowed it down to three slightly different shades of yellow (paint could not always be mixed exactly, so a little variation was allowed). The reason for yellow: “black lettering on that color is easiest to see in the semi-darkness of early morning and late afternoon” — around the times of day when children are heading to school and coming home. The color became known officially as “National School Bus Chrome.” Cyr himself, the article adds, “always thought the color was more orange than yellow.”
Basis: Teachers College, Columbia University, “Frank W. Cyr, ‘Father of the Yellow School Bus,’ Dies at the Age of 95” (August 1995), including Cyr’s recollections at the 1989 luncheon marking the conference’s 50th anniversary. Quotations unchanged.
The color was only one of many decisions. The conference “voted on a total of 44 standards, including body lengths, ceiling heights, door specifications and aisle widths.” Cyr said the group kept coming back to one test: “The most often asked question was ‘Will this standard improve safety?’” When Teachers College wrote about him in 1995, it noted that “Most of those standards have changed since 1939, but the color has remained the same.”
Basis: Teachers College, Columbia University (August 1995). Quotations unchanged.
Why did the yellow last when the other 1939 rules changed? Nobody in the article explains that, so here is only a guess: once drivers everywhere had learned that a big yellow bus means children getting on and off, changing the color might have made buses harder to recognize, not easier. That is a hypothesis, not a finding — can you think of another reason a color might stick around for so long?
※ A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
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