🚕 Why Are Taxis Yellow? The Story of the Yellow Cab
Ask most people why taxis are yellow and you'll get a shrug — it's just always been that way. It hasn't, not really, and the story of how yellow became the default taxi colour in city after city is a genuinely interesting mix of urban legend, sound psychology, and a fairly blunt piece of municipal regulation.
A Chicago entrepreneur and a visibility problem
The story most often told traces back to John Hertz, the Chicago businessman who founded the Yellow Cab Company in the early twentieth century — yes, the same Hertz whose name later ended up on car rental desks at every airport in the world. According to the lore that's followed the company ever since, Hertz was interested in a purely practical question: which colour is easiest for a pedestrian or a passenger to spot at a distance, especially against the grey of a city street? A study, commissioned around that time and often linked to a nearby university, is said to have pointed towards yellow, or a strong yellow-orange, as the most visible colour on the road. Whether every detail of that story survives close scrutiny is debated among transport historians, but the outcome is beyond dispute: Hertz painted his cabs yellow, and the name stuck to the whole concept of a taxi company for the rest of the century.
New York makes it official
Yellow's association with taxis might have stayed a Chicago quirk if New York City hadn't later taken the idea and made it law. For much of the twentieth century, New York's licensed cabs came in whatever colour their operator fancied, which made it easy for unlicensed cabs to pass themselves off as the real thing. In the late 1960s, the city moved to mandate a single uniform colour for every medallion taxi, and yellow was the colour chosen — partly on the visibility logic Hertz had already popularised, and partly because it made a legal cab instantly identifiable to anyone hailing one from the kerb. That single regulatory decision is arguably what cemented "yellow cab" as a global shorthand for taxi, far beyond anywhere Hertz's original company ever operated.
Not every city agreed
It's worth remembering that yellow never became universal. London's black cabs remain proudly, stubbornly black, regulated by a completely different tradition with no need to borrow New York's colour logic. Plenty of other cities settled on white, chequered patterns, or locally distinctive colours of their own. Yellow won in the places it won because of a specific, mostly American chain of events — a Chicago entrepreneur's marketing instinct, then a New York regulation copied by cities that wanted the same instant recognisability. It's less a universal law of taxis and more a very successful piece of branding that happened to also be good public policy.
Why the colour still does its job
Whatever the exact provenance of the original study, the underlying claim holds up: yellow really is one of the easiest colours to pick out against grey tarmac and glass towers, which is exactly the same quality that makes yellow such an effective colour on race cars, road signs and safety equipment generally. It's also, by pure coincidence of city planning, one of the few places you can reliably spot a whole fleet of yellow cars in a single afternoon without needing to go looking for them, which puts taxis in a small club alongside just how rare yellow cars are everywhere else on the road.
A hundred years on, nobody hailing a cab on a rainy street corner is thinking about John Hertz or a 1960s City Hall memo. They're just looking for the colour that's easiest to see — which, it turns out, was rather the whole point all along.