Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbam here and I am recording this episode live
Speaker 1: from the iHeart Podcasts Studio powered by Bows at the
Speaker 1: House of Music at the iHeartRadio Music Festival, which is wild.
Speaker 1: I'm in a little glass box at a music festival
Speaker 1: recording podcasts. But yes, okay, So you know how every
Speaker 1: single school bus in the United States is painted the
Speaker 1: exact same color. This hue is officially known as National
Speaker 1: school Bus Glossy Yellow. But it wasn't always that way.
Speaker 1: A century ago, kids were transported to school by all
Speaker 1: kinds of random vehicles. Because there were no federal standards.
Speaker 1: It was up to states or individual school districts to
Speaker 1: hire buses or trucks or horse drawn wagons to fairy
Speaker 1: kids to and from school. I couldn't figure out if
Speaker 1: anyone actually used fairies. I did look, But in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth thirties, a man by the name of Frank Sear
Speaker 1: didn't like the system. He was a professor at Columbia
Speaker 1: University's Teachers College and an advocate for rural education. Sear
Speaker 1: traveled the country conducting a study of school transportation, and
Speaker 1: upon finding that safety standards were often hit or miss,
Speaker 1: he decided that something needed to be done to keep
Speaker 1: America's school kids safe. So in nineteen thirty nine, Seer
Speaker 1: organized a conference in New York City dedicated to improving
Speaker 1: and standardizing the American school bus. He invited educators, state
Speaker 1: transportation officials, and bus manufacturers to help design a newer,
Speaker 1: safer school bus. At that historic meeting, conference attendees proposed
Speaker 1: forty four national standards for the modern school bus, from
Speaker 1: its dimensions to its doors to the width of its aisle.
Speaker 1: But the standard that made Seer famous was school bus yellow.
Speaker 1: According to William Seer, Frank's son, his father set out
Speaker 1: to find a school bus color that would not only
Speaker 1: be easily the from a distance, but also distinctive. William
Speaker 1: told The New York Times back in twenty thirteen quote,
Speaker 1: they wanted a color that would stand out, that other
Speaker 1: drivers could see from a distance, and that would be
Speaker 1: identified with a school bus, so whenever we saw it
Speaker 1: would think there's a group of kids going someplace. Before
Speaker 1: that they sent kids to school and anything. Before the conference,
Speaker 1: Frank Seer laid out color samples on his office desk
Speaker 1: and instinctively gravitated toward orange. Adjacent shades a spectrum of
Speaker 1: colors ranging from deep orange red to bright lemony yellow.
Speaker 1: At that nineteen thirty nine meeting, Sear hung up fifty
Speaker 1: paint swatches on the walls of the conference room and
Speaker 1: selected a special committee to pick a winner. They chose
Speaker 1: the iconic orange yellow hue that was originally known as
Speaker 1: National school Bus Chrome, so called because it was this
Speaker 1: lead based paint made with chromium. However, because lead based
Speaker 1: paint is toxic and chromium can damage DNA in the
Speaker 1: lungs if it's inhaled, the formulation for school bus yellow
Speaker 1: it was changed in the intervening decades, and yeate for that.
Speaker 1: At the close of the conference, Sear published a forty
Speaker 1: two page booklet proposing the nation's first school bus standards,
Speaker 1: and the cover of the booklet was, of course, school
Speaker 1: bus yellow. Seer wasn't a scientist or a safety expert,
Speaker 1: but he instinctively made the connection between bright colors, visibility
Speaker 1: and vehicle safety. For the articles episodes based on How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works, spoke with doctor Stephen Solomon, a retired optometrist
Speaker 1: and founder of Visibility in Motion, which does consulting for
Speaker 1: emergency services providers. He said, based upon the standards of
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine, yellow was a very intelligent choice. The
Speaker 1: colors that are most easily seen by the human eye
Speaker 1: are the yellows, the yellow green to yellow to greenish yellow.
Speaker 1: That's at the peak of the visibility spectrum. There's no
Speaker 1: color that attracts more attention or is more conspicuous than
Speaker 1: the yellows. The human eye is literally less sensitive to
Speaker 1: colors on the ends of the visible light spectrum, that is,
Speaker 1: blues and violets on one end, and oranges and reds
Speaker 1: on the other. Our color vision is determined by photoreceptor
Speaker 1: cells in the retina called cones. There are three types
Speaker 1: of cones, each tuned to detect different wavelengths of light, red, green,
Speaker 1: or blue. Yellow light stimulates both the red and green
Speaker 1: cone simultaneously, which is why the eye is most sensitive
Speaker 1: to colors in the yellow range. Adding to this, about
Speaker 1: eight percent of men and zero point five percent of
Speaker 1: women are red green color deficient, meaning they have difficulty
Speaker 1: differentiating between reds and greens, often observing both as sort
Speaker 1: of bland looking. The seer probably didn't even consider this,
Speaker 1: in which case it's a stroke of luck that research
Speaker 1: has shown that under all testing conditions, golden yellow is
Speaker 1: the most easily visible color for both people with color
Speaker 1: deficiency and for people without it. Frank Seer died in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five, but he lived to see his yellow
Speaker 1: school buses become the national standard and an American icon.
Speaker 1: According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA,
Speaker 1: any new school bus sold or leased in America must
Speaker 1: meet all federal safety standards, including that bumblebee paint job. A.
Speaker 1: While yellow paint certainly makes school buses more visible and recognizable,
Speaker 1: there's a lot more that goes into making them safe.
Speaker 1: The NHTSA rightly calls school buses the most regulated vehicles
Speaker 1: on the road because modern school buses are equipped with
Speaker 1: safety features like high crush standards, rollover protections, flashing red lights,
Speaker 1: and those stop sign arms. That's because school buses carry
Speaker 1: precious cargo. More than twenty six million American kids ride
Speaker 1: to school each day in some four hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: thousand school buses, and thankfully, less than one percent of
Speaker 1: all traffic fatalities involve children on a school bus. If
Speaker 1: they're so safe, though, why don't all school buses have
Speaker 1: seat belts. We have a whole other episode on that,
Speaker 1: but basically, school buses are big and heavy, so they
Speaker 1: don't stop as suddenly in an actident, and thanks for
Speaker 1: design concept cold compartmentalization, children are protected from injury during
Speaker 1: a crash by closely spaced seats with energy absorbing seatbacks.
Speaker 1: Buses that weigh less than ten thousand pounds or about
Speaker 1: forty five hundred kilos are required to have seat belts,
Speaker 1: by the way, But okay, another side question. If yellow
Speaker 1: is the most visible color, why are fire trucks still red.
Speaker 1: Fire trucks have been painted red for more than a century,
Speaker 1: though no one is sure how the custom began. From
Speaker 1: a safety and visibility perspective, red is not a great choice.
Speaker 1: Red shades are far less visible than yellows during the
Speaker 1: day and virtually disappear at night. Starting in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: some fire departments switched to bright lime yellow for increased visibility,
Speaker 1: and their safety record is impressive. In the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: Solomon and a colleague conducted research comparing the accident rates
Speaker 1: of traditional red fire trucks versus the new yellow engines.
Speaker 1: When one fired apartment in Dallas, Texas, used both red
Speaker 1: and lime yellow fleets. The red trucks were involved in
Speaker 1: accidents at three times the rate of yellow vehicles. Still,
Speaker 1: lots of fire departments are hesitant to make the change.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and nine, the US Fire Administration, a
Speaker 1: division of FEMA, released a report confirming that bright yellow
Speaker 1: and fluorescent colors were more visible than red, but the
Speaker 1: agency didn't recommend a wholesale switch to yellow trucks. Their
Speaker 1: report basically said that people identify fire apparatus with the
Speaker 1: color red, and it's important to have people able to
Speaker 1: quickly identify emergency vehicles in emergency situations. Of course, fire
Speaker 1: trucks also have allowed sirens to warn drivers and pedestrians
Speaker 1: about their approach, unlike school buses, although in some circumstances
Speaker 1: and levels of rowdiness the last day's school maybe a
Speaker 1: warning siren could be appropriate on school buses as well.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was recorded live at the iHeart Podcasts Studio
Speaker 1: powered by Bose at the House of Music at iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: Music Festival. It's based on the article why are school
Speaker 1: Buses yellow? On how Stuffworks dot Com, written by Dave Ruse.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks
Speaker 1: dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more
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