WEBVTT - Short Stuff: School Bus Yellow

0:00:04.280 --> 0:00:06.280
<v Speaker 1>Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and

0:00:06.320 --> 0:00:10.039
<v Speaker 1>there's Chuck, and there's Cherry and the driver's seat hopping along,

0:00:10.160 --> 0:00:14.320
<v Speaker 1>bouncing along in our little stuff. You should know school bus.

0:00:14.680 --> 0:00:18.000
<v Speaker 2>Two quick questions off the top. Did you ever have

0:00:18.040 --> 0:00:20.320
<v Speaker 2>to ride a school bus to school with regularity?

0:00:20.520 --> 0:00:21.639
<v Speaker 1>I've got two words for that.

0:00:21.840 --> 0:00:25.680
<v Speaker 2>Oh yes, and please tell me you do. Do you

0:00:25.680 --> 0:00:27.240
<v Speaker 2>remember the name of your school bus driver?

0:00:29.160 --> 0:00:30.680
<v Speaker 1>I got several words.

0:00:30.960 --> 0:00:31.200
<v Speaker 2>No.

0:00:31.320 --> 0:00:34.040
<v Speaker 1>I feel really bad that I don't now that you ask,

0:00:34.240 --> 0:00:36.480
<v Speaker 1>But no, I don't remember the name of my school

0:00:36.479 --> 0:00:37.040
<v Speaker 1>bus driver.

0:00:37.440 --> 0:00:40.559
<v Speaker 2>Oh that's okay. You may have had several. I have

0:00:40.600 --> 0:00:42.440
<v Speaker 2>a theory that like a school bus driver, if you

0:00:42.479 --> 0:00:43.919
<v Speaker 2>have the same one as one of those, that kind

0:00:43.920 --> 0:00:47.839
<v Speaker 2>of sticks with you. Even though my dad was my principal,

0:00:47.840 --> 0:00:51.479
<v Speaker 2>I usually rode to work with dad, but I did

0:00:51.560 --> 0:00:53.599
<v Speaker 2>ride the school bus some because you want to as

0:00:53.640 --> 0:00:57.120
<v Speaker 2>a kid. Some Ruby's dying to ride a school bus,

0:00:57.120 --> 0:00:58.760
<v Speaker 2>but they don't have one at her school and it's

0:00:58.760 --> 0:01:01.320
<v Speaker 2>always sad when she sees them. But I had. Mister

0:01:01.400 --> 0:01:06.479
<v Speaker 2>Wagnan was my school bus driver, which is interesting now

0:01:06.520 --> 0:01:09.760
<v Speaker 2>that I think of it, because before school buses, you

0:01:09.840 --> 0:01:12.160
<v Speaker 2>might have been taken to school in a wagon.

0:01:14.280 --> 0:01:17.720
<v Speaker 1>That was pretty good. Segue man. It's been a little while, Yeah,

0:01:17.760 --> 0:01:22.319
<v Speaker 1>it's true. Until the nineteen thirties, the late thirties, actually

0:01:22.319 --> 0:01:27.479
<v Speaker 1>the forties probably. Yeah. If you were a rural kid,

0:01:27.880 --> 0:01:30.640
<v Speaker 1>a rod duror or the kid of a rod ur

0:01:31.400 --> 0:01:33.800
<v Speaker 1>and you wanted to get to school, you very well

0:01:33.840 --> 0:01:36.840
<v Speaker 1>may have been taken to school in a horse and

0:01:37.040 --> 0:01:40.600
<v Speaker 1>buggy essentially, or a cart, farm cart, maybe a truck,

0:01:40.959 --> 0:01:43.080
<v Speaker 1>who knows, whatever could get you to school, that's what

0:01:43.120 --> 0:01:46.120
<v Speaker 1>you got to school. And because there was no federal

0:01:46.560 --> 0:01:51.280
<v Speaker 1>system or standardization across the United States, there was whatever

0:01:51.320 --> 0:01:53.800
<v Speaker 1>your school district could think of to get you to school.

0:01:53.960 --> 0:01:57.120
<v Speaker 1>And even trying to get you to school was a

0:01:57.120 --> 0:02:01.720
<v Speaker 1>fairly new concept in the early twenty century after industrialization

0:02:01.880 --> 0:02:05.160
<v Speaker 1>drew everyone to the cities, because the school was in

0:02:05.200 --> 0:02:08.040
<v Speaker 1>the city, that's where most people were. You know, before

0:02:08.080 --> 0:02:10.680
<v Speaker 1>that it was like good luck getting to school. Now

0:02:10.680 --> 0:02:12.120
<v Speaker 1>I was like, okay, we really need to get you

0:02:12.200 --> 0:02:13.880
<v Speaker 1>to school because we have to train you to work

0:02:13.919 --> 0:02:14.600
<v Speaker 1>in these factories.

0:02:14.639 --> 0:02:20.320
<v Speaker 2>Dumb, dumb, exactly. Thankfully there was a gentleman and this

0:02:20.480 --> 0:02:22.800
<v Speaker 2>is just kind of the perfect short stuff. While we

0:02:22.840 --> 0:02:26.320
<v Speaker 2>invented short stuff was because of topics like this, like

0:02:26.360 --> 0:02:28.920
<v Speaker 2>why your school bus is yellow, It's because of a

0:02:28.919 --> 0:02:33.480
<v Speaker 2>man named Frank sear See y R. He was born

0:02:33.520 --> 0:02:35.480
<v Speaker 2>in a rural area. He was raised on a farm

0:02:35.520 --> 0:02:38.440
<v Speaker 2>in Nebraska, and as he grew up he got to

0:02:38.480 --> 0:02:42.040
<v Speaker 2>be in his bonnet to advocate for the education of

0:02:42.200 --> 0:02:46.360
<v Speaker 2>people in rural areas. He was a professor at Teachers College,

0:02:46.360 --> 0:02:51.920
<v Speaker 2>Columbia University, and he started studying school transportation. He was like,

0:02:51.960 --> 0:02:53.160
<v Speaker 2>I'm sure. He was like, you know what, I got

0:02:53.160 --> 0:02:56.400
<v Speaker 2>taken to school in a truck maybe or maybe it

0:02:56.440 --> 0:02:59.360
<v Speaker 2>was even a wagon back then. And we got a

0:02:59.360 --> 0:03:02.679
<v Speaker 2>real hit and miss system going on here. So we

0:03:02.760 --> 0:03:05.000
<v Speaker 2>need to protect kids, keep them safe on the way

0:03:05.000 --> 0:03:08.240
<v Speaker 2>to school. And a good way to start that is

0:03:08.440 --> 0:03:11.000
<v Speaker 2>nine years later, in nineteen thirty nine, he organized a

0:03:11.040 --> 0:03:16.120
<v Speaker 2>conference in New York City about improving and standardizing the

0:03:16.200 --> 0:03:17.480
<v Speaker 2>American school bus.

0:03:17.960 --> 0:03:20.600
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and it was a success. He didn't just get

0:03:20.600 --> 0:03:23.720
<v Speaker 1>crickets back. He got a lot of people, educators, people

0:03:23.800 --> 0:03:28.240
<v Speaker 1>who were in charge of transportation for their counties, people

0:03:28.280 --> 0:03:31.040
<v Speaker 1>who made buses all showed up to New York City

0:03:31.120 --> 0:03:34.160
<v Speaker 1>in that nineteen thirty nine conference and he said, Okay,

0:03:34.560 --> 0:03:37.920
<v Speaker 1>let's create these standards, and by the end of the conference,

0:03:37.960 --> 0:03:40.400
<v Speaker 1>we're going to have come up with standards for school

0:03:40.400 --> 0:03:44.160
<v Speaker 1>buses throughout the entire United States. And now it's just like,

0:03:44.800 --> 0:03:47.000
<v Speaker 1>you know, big whoop. But if you go back and

0:03:47.040 --> 0:03:49.720
<v Speaker 1>think about it, especially that this just didn't exist and

0:03:49.760 --> 0:03:52.240
<v Speaker 1>he created it out of thin air, it's a pretty

0:03:52.280 --> 0:03:55.520
<v Speaker 1>cool accomplishment actually, because he was successful immediately.

0:03:56.280 --> 0:03:59.000
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Absolutely, that's why. You know, when you get on

0:03:59.000 --> 0:04:01.120
<v Speaker 2>a school bus, you're gonna have the same width of

0:04:01.200 --> 0:04:04.120
<v Speaker 2>the aisle, the seats are going to be basically the same,

0:04:04.640 --> 0:04:07.040
<v Speaker 2>the doors and the dimensions of this stuff are going

0:04:07.120 --> 0:04:09.920
<v Speaker 2>to be the same. But what Frank's here is really

0:04:09.960 --> 0:04:14.240
<v Speaker 2>really known for is school bus yellow or the official

0:04:14.320 --> 0:04:17.839
<v Speaker 2>name is National school Bus Glossy Yellow.

0:04:18.080 --> 0:04:18.880
<v Speaker 1>Pretty great name.

0:04:19.480 --> 0:04:20.440
<v Speaker 2>I love it.

0:04:20.440 --> 0:04:23.680
<v Speaker 1>It's a mouthful. But the reason that that was part

0:04:23.760 --> 0:04:28.400
<v Speaker 1>of the standardization too was, as Frank Seer's son William

0:04:28.440 --> 0:04:33.040
<v Speaker 1>put it, that whenever you saw a bus that color,

0:04:33.120 --> 0:04:36.360
<v Speaker 1>you'd think, Okay, there's a bunch of kids going somewhere. Yeah,

0:04:36.520 --> 0:04:39.320
<v Speaker 1>you just associated with this. So that meant they needed

0:04:39.320 --> 0:04:43.200
<v Speaker 1>an eye catching color that wasn't already widely used, that

0:04:43.279 --> 0:04:46.839
<v Speaker 1>they could associate with school buses and that's exactly what

0:04:46.880 --> 0:04:47.520
<v Speaker 1>they came up with.

0:04:48.160 --> 0:04:52.040
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. So, as the story goes, Sere was looking at

0:04:52.080 --> 0:04:55.640
<v Speaker 2>colors in his office was really drawn to all these

0:04:55.640 --> 0:05:00.599
<v Speaker 2>colors on the orange spectrum, different kinds of yellows, yellow greens,

0:05:00.720 --> 0:05:03.680
<v Speaker 2>stuff like that, because he wanted something that stood out.

0:05:04.080 --> 0:05:08.240
<v Speaker 2>And at that nineteen thirty nine meeting he brought fifty cheese.

0:05:08.279 --> 0:05:11.320
<v Speaker 2>He narrowed it down to fifty choices. I probably would

0:05:11.320 --> 0:05:15.200
<v Speaker 2>have brought like three maybe, but he brought fifty choices,

0:05:15.400 --> 0:05:18.000
<v Speaker 2>hung them on the wall and said, all right, we

0:05:18.040 --> 0:05:20.480
<v Speaker 2>need a special committee. We're all going to decide on this.

0:05:20.960 --> 0:05:25.839
<v Speaker 2>And they chose that sort of yellowish orange color originally

0:05:25.920 --> 0:05:29.240
<v Speaker 2>called National school Bus Chrome, and that was it. He

0:05:29.279 --> 0:05:33.120
<v Speaker 2>published a forty two page booklet saying here's the standards

0:05:33.120 --> 0:05:36.440
<v Speaker 2>that we're proposing, and that pamphlet was school bus yellow.

0:05:36.560 --> 0:05:38.880
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I say, we take a break and when we

0:05:38.960 --> 0:05:42.160
<v Speaker 1>come back, we'll explain why that was such a great

0:05:42.920 --> 0:05:44.520
<v Speaker 1>color for year to pick.

0:05:45.640 --> 0:06:08.680
<v Speaker 3>Let's do it, okay, Chuck.

0:06:08.760 --> 0:06:13.080
<v Speaker 1>So Frank Seer and his conference members at that nineteen

0:06:13.120 --> 0:06:16.440
<v Speaker 1>thirty nine conference, they came up with forty four dimensions

0:06:16.440 --> 0:06:19.240
<v Speaker 1>for the school bus, or forty four standards for the

0:06:19.279 --> 0:06:22.880
<v Speaker 1>school bus, and one of them was school bus glossy yellow.

0:06:23.440 --> 0:06:27.640
<v Speaker 1>And Frank Seer was not a safety expert, he was

0:06:27.680 --> 0:06:30.640
<v Speaker 1>not a visual scientist, he was not an optimologist. He

0:06:30.960 --> 0:06:34.640
<v Speaker 1>didn't know anything, but he had a good gut for

0:06:34.760 --> 0:06:37.520
<v Speaker 1>picking out what color would be the best one to pick,

0:06:38.440 --> 0:06:41.960
<v Speaker 1>and that yellow was a really great color. Because as

0:06:42.720 --> 0:06:46.600
<v Speaker 1>this guy who's interviewed, doctor Stephen Solomon, he's an optometrist

0:06:46.640 --> 0:06:50.040
<v Speaker 1>and founder of a company called Visibility Emotion, which is

0:06:50.080 --> 0:06:53.640
<v Speaker 1>a consulting group. He said that yellows are most easily

0:06:53.640 --> 0:06:58.839
<v Speaker 1>seen by the human eye, not just for any people

0:06:58.880 --> 0:07:01.799
<v Speaker 1>with normal vision, but even if you have red green

0:07:01.880 --> 0:07:06.320
<v Speaker 1>colored deficiency, you still see yellow. And he basically said,

0:07:06.360 --> 0:07:10.480
<v Speaker 1>like Frank Seer stumbled upon essentially the perfect safe color.

0:07:11.680 --> 0:07:13.960
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that's awesome. I love it.

0:07:14.760 --> 0:07:18.360
<v Speaker 1>The reason why yellow is so visible is because it

0:07:18.520 --> 0:07:21.920
<v Speaker 1>stimulates both the red and the green cones. We've got red, green,

0:07:21.920 --> 0:07:24.800
<v Speaker 1>and blue cones and it just sets two of them

0:07:24.800 --> 0:07:28.240
<v Speaker 1>a flame. Right, So even if you have red green

0:07:28.280 --> 0:07:31.880
<v Speaker 1>color blindness, you can't differentiate red or green. Yellow says,

0:07:32.000 --> 0:07:35.280
<v Speaker 1>hey what about neither? And you can still see yellow.

0:07:36.480 --> 0:07:40.360
<v Speaker 2>I love it. So it works for almost everybody. Imagine

0:07:40.400 --> 0:07:42.320
<v Speaker 2>there's somebody that probably can't see yellow, right.

0:07:42.600 --> 0:07:44.960
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I guess, but they're probably just being contrarian.

0:07:45.760 --> 0:07:49.600
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Maybe so Frank's here passed away in nineteen ninety five,

0:07:49.760 --> 0:07:53.480
<v Speaker 2>but obviously was able to see his vision. I imagine

0:07:53.480 --> 0:07:55.840
<v Speaker 2>every time Frank's here was out on the road and

0:07:55.880 --> 0:07:58.840
<v Speaker 2>saw one of those yellow school buses, he probably felt

0:07:58.880 --> 0:08:02.320
<v Speaker 2>a little little warm in his tom thumbs. I know

0:08:02.440 --> 0:08:06.080
<v Speaker 2>I would. So these days, any school bus in the

0:08:06.200 --> 0:08:09.760
<v Speaker 2>United States of America that is sold or lease they

0:08:09.760 --> 0:08:13.040
<v Speaker 2>have to meet all those federal safety standards and be

0:08:13.120 --> 0:08:16.760
<v Speaker 2>painted that color. I do think it's funny. And we're

0:08:16.800 --> 0:08:19.480
<v Speaker 2>going to cover this kind of quickly. That and this

0:08:19.520 --> 0:08:22.280
<v Speaker 2>is something I've always wondered that they got together. They said,

0:08:22.280 --> 0:08:24.920
<v Speaker 2>all right, let's get forty four standards, width of stuff,

0:08:25.040 --> 0:08:28.680
<v Speaker 2>heights of stuff. But we're all in agreement. No seat belts, right.

0:08:29.320 --> 0:08:30.520
<v Speaker 1>I know, it's crazy.

0:08:31.120 --> 0:08:32.960
<v Speaker 2>I've always wondered about that, but it kind of makes

0:08:32.960 --> 0:08:35.760
<v Speaker 2>sense when it's explained here. And by the way, big

0:08:35.760 --> 0:08:38.959
<v Speaker 2>thanks to Dave Ruse. This is one of his short

0:08:39.080 --> 0:08:44.440
<v Speaker 2>articles from housti works dot com. But school buses don't

0:08:44.520 --> 0:08:50.360
<v Speaker 2>drive super fast, they don't hit like when they are

0:08:50.400 --> 0:08:53.000
<v Speaker 2>in an accident. It's usually not the kind of thing

0:08:53.080 --> 0:08:58.240
<v Speaker 2>where like there's a very fast stop. They're heavy, they're slow,

0:08:58.840 --> 0:09:01.720
<v Speaker 2>they don't stop suddenly if there's an accident. I mean

0:09:01.720 --> 0:09:04.920
<v Speaker 2>they plow through whatever they're hitting. Is in reality what happens.

0:09:05.559 --> 0:09:08.520
<v Speaker 2>So the seat belts, Like for a kid fifteen rows

0:09:08.559 --> 0:09:13.600
<v Speaker 2>back plowing through a Prius at twenty three miles an hour,

0:09:14.200 --> 0:09:16.600
<v Speaker 2>that kid's not going to go go flying, you know,

0:09:16.920 --> 0:09:18.720
<v Speaker 2>eighteen feet through the front windshield.

0:09:18.760 --> 0:09:21.040
<v Speaker 1>That kid'll just be like, hey, watch the speed.

0:09:20.760 --> 0:09:27.040
<v Speaker 2>Bumps, mister wagnan. But school buses are very heavily regulated

0:09:27.080 --> 0:09:31.600
<v Speaker 2>and very safe. They are compartmentalized, so you know, those

0:09:31.679 --> 0:09:34.640
<v Speaker 2>seats are very closely spaced for that reason. They have

0:09:34.880 --> 0:09:38.720
<v Speaker 2>energy absorbing backs for that reason. There's all sorts of

0:09:38.800 --> 0:09:42.679
<v Speaker 2>rollover protection and crush standards and stuff like that. So

0:09:43.040 --> 0:09:46.440
<v Speaker 2>school buses are safe. They just don't have seat belts.

0:09:46.600 --> 0:09:50.000
<v Speaker 1>Statistically speaking, they're safe too. Apparently in the United States,

0:09:51.320 --> 0:09:55.920
<v Speaker 1>any given weekday, twenty six million American kids ride to

0:09:55.960 --> 0:09:59.120
<v Speaker 1>school on a school bus. And I looked up a

0:09:59.160 --> 0:10:01.360
<v Speaker 1>lot of trouble finding this, but I'm pretty sure what

0:10:01.440 --> 0:10:04.640
<v Speaker 1>I found was that that's more than twenty percent of

0:10:04.679 --> 0:10:06.839
<v Speaker 1>the people on the road in the United States and

0:10:06.920 --> 0:10:10.360
<v Speaker 1>any given weekday. Wow, and yet it represents less than

0:10:10.440 --> 0:10:12.880
<v Speaker 1>one percent of all traffic fatalities.

0:10:13.360 --> 0:10:15.240
<v Speaker 2>Now was that rush hour stats?

0:10:15.800 --> 0:10:18.240
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, man, I tried really hard. I couldn't

0:10:18.240 --> 0:10:21.240
<v Speaker 1>find anything nuanced like that. I basically had to cobble

0:10:21.280 --> 0:10:24.200
<v Speaker 1>it together myself. So what I found was that on

0:10:23.920 --> 0:10:27.800
<v Speaker 1>the on the road something like thirty six percent of

0:10:27.880 --> 0:10:32.800
<v Speaker 1>Americans drive any given day. So I took that and

0:10:33.280 --> 0:10:35.880
<v Speaker 1>figured out how many Americans there are? Was thirty six

0:10:35.920 --> 0:10:40.160
<v Speaker 1>percent of that percentage is twenty six million that number,

0:10:40.280 --> 0:10:42.400
<v Speaker 1>and that's where I came up with more than twenty percent.

0:10:43.040 --> 0:10:44.600
<v Speaker 2>No, no, no, I like it. I think it tracks, and

0:10:44.640 --> 0:10:46.600
<v Speaker 2>I think that we will definitely hear from someone who

0:10:47.280 --> 0:10:49.120
<v Speaker 2>thinks they have found a better way to calculate that.

0:10:49.840 --> 0:10:53.079
<v Speaker 2>But just the eyeball test. When I'm driving Ruby to

0:10:53.080 --> 0:10:55.840
<v Speaker 2>school in the morning, we see a lot of school buses,

0:10:56.000 --> 0:10:56.920
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, everywhere.

0:10:56.960 --> 0:10:58.920
<v Speaker 1>You do not want to get behind one.

0:10:59.240 --> 0:11:01.920
<v Speaker 2>No, and you do want to stop though if that

0:11:02.120 --> 0:11:04.599
<v Speaker 2>arm goes out, because that is a I don't know

0:11:04.640 --> 0:11:08.480
<v Speaker 2>if it's true, but I heard that that is like

0:11:09.160 --> 0:11:11.960
<v Speaker 2>the second worst moving violation you can get behind, like

0:11:11.960 --> 0:11:13.920
<v Speaker 2>a dui. I don't know if that's true, but I

0:11:14.000 --> 0:11:16.360
<v Speaker 2>know it is a hefty fine. They don't take lightly.

0:11:16.520 --> 0:11:18.280
<v Speaker 1>It seems like it should be. And I mean, even

0:11:18.320 --> 0:11:20.800
<v Speaker 1>if the cops don't get you, there's people who will

0:11:20.880 --> 0:11:23.439
<v Speaker 1>chase you in their car if they see you do that.

0:11:23.800 --> 0:11:28.400
<v Speaker 1>It's a really gross violation of like social standards.

0:11:28.960 --> 0:11:30.000
<v Speaker 2>It is you don't do that.

0:11:30.240 --> 0:11:32.360
<v Speaker 1>No, you're like, I don't care about children's lives, is

0:11:32.360 --> 0:11:35.840
<v Speaker 1>what you're saying. I need to get to Starbucks, I

0:11:35.880 --> 0:11:38.520
<v Speaker 1>need to get to Cracker Barrel. I need to get

0:11:38.559 --> 0:11:41.560
<v Speaker 1>somewhere that's more important than a child's life, is what

0:11:41.559 --> 0:11:42.760
<v Speaker 1>you're shouting at everyone.

0:11:43.320 --> 0:11:45.240
<v Speaker 2>You know, who else didn't care about children's lives? Is

0:11:45.280 --> 0:11:48.400
<v Speaker 2>that guy who kidnapped that school bus, yellow school bus

0:11:48.440 --> 0:11:50.920
<v Speaker 2>in Chowchilla. Yeah, buried that thing.

0:11:51.400 --> 0:11:54.080
<v Speaker 1>That's right, You got anything else?

0:11:54.840 --> 0:11:58.880
<v Speaker 2>No, that's a past episode Chowchilla school kidnapping. Look it up.

0:11:58.920 --> 0:11:59.320
<v Speaker 2>It's great.

0:11:59.480 --> 0:12:02.559
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Hats off to Frank Seer and heads off to

0:12:02.640 --> 0:12:06.559
<v Speaker 1>Short Stuff, which is out.

0:12:07.120 --> 0:12:10.040
<v Speaker 2>Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For

0:12:10.120 --> 0:12:14.280
<v Speaker 2>more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

0:12:14.400 --> 0:12:16.240
<v Speaker 2>or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,