Printable Bus, Taxi and Van Coloring Pages for Kids

Many American cities ran their public transit on electric streetcars through the early 1900s before gradually switching to motor buses running on regular streets, a shift that sped up through the 1930s and 1940s as buses offered more flexible routes without fixed rails. General Motors built the widely used New Look transit bus starting in 1959, a boxy, high-floor design with a flat front and large flip-down windows that became the standard city bus shape for decades.

Those older transit buses required riders to climb two or three steep steps just to board, a design that worked fine for most adults but shut out wheelchair users and anyone with mobility trouble entirely.

Before 1939, school buses across the United States came painted in whatever color a local district or manufacturer chose, making it hard for drivers and children to recognize a bus at a glance. Education professor Frank W. Cyr organized a national conference at Columbia University that year, bringing together paint companies and school officials to agree on a single standard shade, later nicknamed National School Bus Glossy Yellow, chosen because it stays visible in both dawn light and headlight glare.

That same 1939 conference also set standard body lengths and construction rules, turning school bus manufacturing from a patchwork of local builders into a coordinated national industry almost overnight.

Horse-drawn wagons called 'kid hacks' carried rural students to one-room schoolhouses in the late 1800s, long before engines replaced hooves. Once motorized trucks became common in the 1920s, builders began mounting simple wooden or steel bus bodies onto truck chassis, and the vehicle we recognize today started to take shape.

Those early wooden bus bodies rattled loudly on unpaved country roads and offered almost no protection in a crash, which pushed rural school boards to demand sturdier steel construction by the early 1930s. Manufacturers across different states built their own version of a bus body with no shared design rules at all, so a bus built in one county could look completely different from one built two counties over.

Double-decker buses trace back to horse-drawn omnibuses of the 1850s in London, which added bench seating on the roof once city officials realized a second level could carry far more riders without needing a longer, wider vehicle. Those rooftop seats, nicknamed the "knifeboard" for the narrow back-to-back bench running down the middle, were the cheapest fare on the bus and stayed open to the weather for decades. Motorized double-deckers replaced the horse-drawn versions in the early 1900s, keeping the same two-level idea but adding an engine and, eventually, an enclosed upper deck with a proper roof and glass windows like the ones filling this coloring page.

That rooftop sign reading "TAXI" traces back to a French word, taximetre, which itself combines the Greek word for tax or charge with the French word for meter. A taximeter is the mechanical device that calculates a fare based on distance and time, and horse-drawn cabs fitted with early versions of the device were called taximeter cabs in Europe by the early 1900s. English speakers eventually shortened that mouthful down to just "taxi."

Before meters existed, hiring a horse-drawn carriage meant haggling over a price with the driver every single time, and visitors to a new city had no way of knowing whether they were being overcharged.

The yellow taxi cab is one of the most iconic vehicles in the world, instantly associated with the energy and bustle of city life. This free taxi coloring sheet captures that classic, unmistakable silhouette in clean lines that are fun and easy to color.

Horse-drawn hansom cabs carried New Yorkers around the city for most of the 1800s, but gasoline-powered taxis arrived in 1907, when a businessman named Harry Allen imported a fleet of French-built cars specifically to replace the horses. Allen is also credited with picking yellow for his fleet after reading a University of Chicago study claiming yellow was the easiest color for the human eye to spot at a distance, a choice that stuck long after his own company folded.

By the 1930s, thousands of independent cab owners crowded city streets with no standard color or shape at all, which led regulators to require a uniform look so riders could tell a licensed taxi from an unmarked car.

Placing an iconic New York City yellow taxi within a full Manhattan street scene transforms this from a simple vehicle coloring sheet into a mini slice of one of the world's most exciting cities.

The first camper vans grew out of ordinary delivery vans in the 1950s and 1960s, when owners added simple beds, a small stove, and curtains to turn a work vehicle into weekend lodging on wheels. Manufacturers soon began building dedicated camper shells like the raised sleeping cab shown on this page, designed from the start to sleep two or more people comfortably.

One of the earliest and most recognizable versions was the Volkswagen Type 2, nicknamed the Bus or the Microbus, which German coachbuilder Westfalia began fitting with fold-out beds and small pop-up roofs starting in 1951. That boxy silhouette, rounded front, tall sides, and a low, simple cab, set a visual template that camper vans have followed for more than 70 years, right down to the rounded nose drawn on this page.

Before automobiles, funeral processions used ornate horse-drawn carriages built specifically to carry a casket, often decorated with carved wood panels and tall glass sides so the carriage could be seen clearly during a procession. The first motorized funeral cars appeared in the early 1900s, built by adapting existing car and truck chassis to the same basic job. Some of those early motorized models still kept a carriage-style roofline and side lamps, since builders wanted the new machines to feel familiar rather than jarring during such a solemn moment.

A hearse usually starts life as a standard car or SUV chassis that a specialty coachbuilder stretches and rebuilds.