Yellow Taxi in New York City Coloring Page and PDF Sheet

Taxi in New York City: History & Fun Facts

The First Motor Cabs on Manhattan Streets

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. That push for a single recognizable design is the direct ancestor of the checkered stripe and roof light on the cab in this scene.

Why New York Capped the Number of Cabs

New York City introduced a medallion system in 1937, issuing a fixed number of small metal permits that a car legally needs bolted to its hood to operate as a street-hailing taxi. Only a little over 13,000 medallions exist today, a number set decades ago that has barely grown even as the city's population and streets expanded around it.

Because medallions are limited and transferable, they became valuable enough that owners once paid over a million dollars for a single one before ride-hailing apps changed the market. That scarcity is part of why hailing a cab with a raised arm on a busy corner became such a recognizable piece of city life long before smartphones existed.

The Checker Cab and the Crown Victoria Years

The boxy, roomy Checker Motors cab, built specifically for taxi duty rather than adapted from a regular car, dominated New York streets from the 1950s through the early 1980s before the company stopped production. Ford's Crown Victoria took over as the dominant taxi body style for the following two decades, prized by fleet owners for its durable frame and low repair costs after hundreds of thousands of miles of stop-and-go city driving.

Today's fleet looks different again: hybrid sedans and wheelchair-accessible vans have replaced most Crown Victorias, part of a city mandate requiring all yellow cabs to be wheelchair accessible by 2038, even as the classic checkered stripe painted along the doors stays exactly the same.

Reading the Rooftop Light and the Meter

The lit rooftop sign reading "TAXI" is more than decoration. When the center number panel is lit, the cab is available for a fare; when it goes dark, a passenger is already inside, a signal system regular New Yorkers read from half a block away without thinking twice. Inside, a meter tracks the fare using both distance traveled and time spent stuck in traffic, a dual system adopted precisely because gridlocked streets would otherwise let a slow ride cost a rider nothing extra.

New York's roughly 13,000 yellow medallion cabs together complete well over 100 million trips in a typical year, making the car in this scene one small stand-in for one of the busiest taxi fleets on the planet.